“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause, one of many, at 9:37.) While operating through the body structures, consciousnesses such as your own focus largely upon the three-dimensional orientation. In out-of-body states, however, consciousness can travel faster than light — often, in fact, instantaneously.

From your ordinary point of view the traveling consciousness is off-focus, not locked into physical coordinates in the designated fashion. The so-called inner world can be at least theoretically explored, however, in just such a way. Consciousness “unlocks” itself for a while from its usual coordinates. When this happens the out-of-body traveler is not simply out of his or her corporal form. The person steps out of usual context. Even if an individual leaves the body and wanders about the room no more than a few feet away from where the body is located,³ there are alterations, dash — the relationship of consciousness to the room is different. The relationship of the individual to time and space has altered. Time out of the body is “free time” by your standards. You do not age, for example, although this effect varies according to certain principles. I will mention these later.⁴

(Pause at 10:10.) When consciousness leaves the body, therefore, it alters some of the coordinates. There are various questions involving the nature of perception that then occur, and these will be discussed somewhat later (but see Note 4). Consciousness is equipped to focus its main energy, in your terms at least, generally within the body, or to stray from it for varying amounts of time. Theoretically, your human consciousness can take many different roads while still maintaining its physical base. In far-past historical times, different kinds of orientation were experimented with (as by the “sleepwalkers” described in the last session, for instance). Your own present private experience can give hints and clues about such other cultures, for those abilities reside within the natural framework, now, but are underdeveloped.

Dictation: We will be discussing alternate methods of orientation that consciousness can take when allied with flesh, trying to give the reader some personal experience with such altered conditions, along with a brief history of some civilizations that utilized these unofficial orientations as their predominant method of focus.

In greater terms you are just as awake when you are asleep, but the focus of your awareness is turned in other directions. As you know, you can live for years while in a coma, but you could not live for years without ever sleeping. Even in a coma there is mental activity, though it may be impossible to ascertain it from the outside. A certain kind of free conscious behavior is possible when you are not physically oriented as you are in the waking state, and that activity is necessary even for physical survival.

Your own main consciousness has the ability to travel faster than light (as noted at 9:37), but those perceptions are too fast, and the neurologically structured patterns that you accept cannot capture them. For that matter, cellular comprehension and reaction are too fast for you to follow. The poised framework of physical existence requires a particular platform of experience that you accept as valid and real. At that level only is the universe that you know experienced. That platform or focus is the result of the finest cooperation. Your own free consciousness and your body consciousness form an alliance that makes this possible.

(With many pauses:) Give us a moment … Such a performance actually means that physical reality clicks off and on.¹¹ In your terms, it exists only in your waking hours. The inner work that makes it possible is largely done in the sleep state. The meeting of body consciousness and your main consciousness requires an intense focus, in which the greatest manipulations are necessary. Perceptions must be precise in physical terms. To some extent, however, that exquisite concentration means that certain limitations occur. Cellular comprehension is not tuned into by the normally conscious self, which is equally unaware of its own free-wheeling nature at “higher” levels. So a disengagement process must happen that allows each to regenerate. The consciousness then leaves the body. The body consciousness stays with it.

9. Appendixes 4 and 5, in Volume 1, show the insights Jane herself has gained so far about the more complicated trances she experiences while delivering the sessions for “Unknown” Reality. As noted in Appendix 4, she waits for that “certain clear focus” she needs before taking up the challenges of “translating multidimensional experience into linear terms and thought patterns.” And from Appendix 5: “It’s as though my consciousness is trying to use a new kind of organization — for me, for it — and so there’s a kind of unfamiliarity.”