“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

(9:48.) Such a traveling consciousness may journey within physical reality, colon: While not relating to that system in the usual manner, it may still be allied with it. From that viewpoint matter itself will seem to appear differently than it does ordinarily. On the other hand, an out-of-body consciousness may also enter other physically attuned realities: those operating “at different frequencies than your own.” The basically independent nature of consciousness allows for such disentanglement.⁵ The body consciousness maintains its own equilibrium, and acts somewhat like a maintenance station.

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.

3. One of the most unique out-of-body experiences, or projections, I’ve had was much like that which Seth describes here. It took place in April 1971, and I wrote about it in Chapter 20 of Seth Speaks. See the notes for the 583rd session. My consciousness didn’t travel more than 10 feet from my body that time, but the little journey, so vivid and pleasant, did much to reinforce the enlarged view of reality that I’d gradually begun to adopt after Jane started delivering the Seth material late in 1963. I’ve never forgotten the sense of freedom that that modest projection engendered within me — and during it, my temporal relationships were different.

In Note 12 for Appendix 12, I wrote about out-of-body travel and naïve realism.