“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There are techniques for using cameras,¹ and a camera left at home will do you little good abroad. So it is the conscious alert mind that must take these pictures if you hope to later make sense of your inner journeys. That conscious reasoning mind must therefore be taken along. There are many ways of doing this, methods not really difficult to follow. Certain techniques will help you pack your conscious mind for your journey as you would pack your camera. It will be there when you need it, to take the pictures that will be your conscious memories of your journey.

(10:16.) Now: In almost all instances, demons in dreams represent the dreamer’s belief in evil, instantly materialized. They are not the inhabitants of some nether world, then, or underground. We will be giving some instructions that will enable readers to experiment with the projection of consciousness at least to some extent. It is very important for you to realize that even in dreams you form your own reality. Your state of mind, freed from its usual physical focus, creatively expresses itself in all of its power and brilliance. The state of mind itself serves as an intent, propelling you into realities of like conditions.

That kind of structuring also does a disservice, however, for it prevents you from coming in contact with your own original concepts. There is no reason, for example, to encounter any demons or devils in any trance or out-of-body condition.³ (Pause.) In such cases your own hallucinations blind you to the environment within which they are projected. When your consciousness is not directly focused in physical reality, then, the great creativity of the psyche is given fuller play. All of its dimensions are faithfully and instantly produced as experience when you learn to take your “normally alert” conscious mind with you; and when you are free of such limiting ideas, then at those levels you can glimpse the inner powers of your own psyche, and watch the interplay of beliefs and symbols as they are manifested before your eyes. Until you learn to do this you will most certainly have difficulty, for you will not be able to tell the difference between your projections and what is happening in the inner environment.

The inner lands have not been as well explored. To say the least, they lie in virgin territory as far as your conscious mind is concerned. Others have journeyed to some of these interior locales, but since they were indeed explorers they had to learn as they went along. Some, returning, provided guidebooks or travel folders, telling us what could be expected. You make your own reality. If you were from a foreign land and asked one person to give you a description of New York City, you might take his or her description for reality. The person might say “New York City is a frightful place in which crime is rampant, gangs roam the streets, murders and rapes are the norm, and people are not only impolite but ready to attack you at a moment’s notice. There are no trees. The air is polluted, and you can expect only violence.” If you asked someone else, this individual might say instead: “New York City has the finest of museums, open-air concerts in some of the parks, fine sculpture, theater, and probably the greatest collection of books outside of the Vatican. It has a good overall climate, a great mixture of cultures. In it, millions of people go their way daily in freedom.” Period. Both people would be speaking about the same locale. Their descriptions would vary because of their private beliefs, and would be colored by the individual focus from which each of them viewed that city.

[...] A good general question, we think, and one we’d like to see discussed with our own ideas of the inviolate nature of the individual in mind, has to do with the prevalence of ordinary, daily, conscious-mind thinking and perception throughout much of the world. [...]

[...] Don’t be so anxious to throw your individuality back into their faces, saying, ‘I’m sick to death of myself and of my individuality; it burdens me.’ Even one squirrel’s consciousness, suddenly thrown into the body of another of its kind, would feel a sense of loss, encounter a strangeness, and know in the sacredness of its being that something was wrong. [...] Through honoring yourself, you honor whatever it is God is, and become a conscious co-creator.”

Certainly the species must be putting its conscious activities to long-term use, however, even with the endless conflicts and questions that grow out of such behavior. During the many centuries of our remembered history, those conflicts in themselves have been — and are — surely serving at least one of consciousness’s overall purposes, within our limits of understanding: to know itself more fully in those particular, differentiated ways.

[...] I added that even though we have no interest in putting down other approaches to inner reality, still we’re firm believers in the “inviolate nature of the individual consciousness, before, during, and after physical existence, in ordinary terms.”¹ So, here, we leave it up to the reader to make the intuitive and overt connections between Seth’s philosophy and the material Jane wrote today. [...]