“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) In your world you travel from one country to another, and you do not expect them to be all alike. Instead, you visit various parts of the world precisely because of the differences among them — so all out-of-body-journeys do not lead to the same locale.

You must remember that the objective world also is a projection from the psyche.² Because you focus in it primarily, you understand its rules well enough to get along. A trip in the physical world merely represents the decision to walk or to choose a particular kind of vehicle — a car will not carry you across the ocean, so you take a ship or a plane. You are not astonished to see that the land suddenly gives way to water. You find that natural alteration quite normal. You expect time to stay in its place, however. The land may change to water, for example, but today must not change into yesterday in the same fashion, or into tomorrow in the beginning of today’s afternoon.

Walking down the avenue, you expect the trees to stay in their places, and not transform themselves into buildings. All of these assumptions are taken for granted in your physical journeys. You may find different customs and languages, yet even these will be accepted in the vast, overall, basic assumptions within whose boundaries physical life occurs. You are most certainly traveling through the private and mass psyche when you so much as walk down the street. The physical world seems objective and outside of yourself, however. The idea of such outsideness is one of the assumptions upon which you build that existence. Interior traveling is no more subjective, then, than a journey from New York to San Francisco. You are used to projecting all destinations outside of yourself. Period. The idea of varied inward destinations, involving motion through time and space, therefore appears strange.

Generally speaking, you have explored the physical planet enough so that you have a good idea of what to expect as you travel from country to country.

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.

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.