“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you are in a world not yours, with your consciousness drifting, you are in free gear, so to speak, your feelings and thoughts flowing into experience. You have to learn how to distinguish your psychological state from the reality in which you find yourself, if you want to maintain your alertness and explore that environment. Many of my readers find themselves in just such situations while they are sleeping. While still dreaming they seem to come suddenly awake in an environment that appears to make no sense. Demons may be chasing them. The world may seem topsy-turvy. The dead and the living may meet and speak.

(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.

You may, for example, have read books numbering the “inner realms,” and telling you what you can expect to encounter in each. Many of these speak of lords or gods of the realm, or of demons. In a strange way these books do provide a service, for at certain levels you will find your own ideas materialized; and if you believe in demons then in those terms you will encounter them. The authors, however, suppose that the devils have a reality outside of your belief in them, and such is not the case. The demons simply represent a state of your own mind that is seemingly out there, objectified. Therefore, whatever methods the authors used to triumph over these demons is often given as proof not only of the demons’ reality, but of each method’s effectiveness.

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.

3. In Chapter 14 of The Seth Material, Jane and Seth gave a humorous-serious account of her out-of-body encounter with a demon, or “black thing,” of her own creation.