“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation (quietly): To explore the unknown reality you must venture within your own psyche, travel inward through invisible roads as you journey outward on physical ones.

In the dream state and in certain other levels of reality, ideas and their symbols are immediately experienced. There is no time lag, then, between a feeling and its “exteriorized” condition. It is automatically experienced in whatever form is familiar and natural to the one who holds it. The psyche is presented with its own concepts, which are instantly reflected in dream situations and other events that will be explained shortly. If you dream of or yearn for a new house in physical life, for instance, it may take some time before that ideal is realized, even though such a strong intent will most certainly bring about its physical fulfillment. The same desire in the dreaming state, however, may lead to the instant creation of such a house as far as your dream experience is concerned. Again, there is no time lag there between desire and its materialization.

(Pause, in a quiet but intent delivery.) At these levels you are still close to home. Beyond, there are layers of actuality in which your psyche is also highly involved, and these may or may not appear to have anything to do with the world that you know.

To begin with, your own symbols rise from deep levels of the psyche, and in certain terms you are a part of any reality that you experience — but you may have difficulty in the interpretation of events.

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.

(Pause at 11:13.) Explorers traveling into inner reality, however, do not have the same kind of landmarks to begin with. Many have been so excited with their discoveries that they wrote guidebooks long before they even began to explore the inner landscape. They did not understand that they found what they wanted to find, or that the seemingly objective phenomena originated in the reflections of the psyche.

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.

Any exploration of inner reality must necessarily involve a journey through the psyche, and these effects can be thought of as atmospheric conditions, natural at a certain stage, through which you pass as you continue. Period.

(The quotations also indicate how pervasive the regular Western view of “reality” is in our society, and what an undertaking it is to step outside of that framework or just to enlarge upon it. Jane is still in the process of that objective, intellectual — and yet very emotional — movement of her psyche [as I am], but she’s made considerable progress. In each of her books she tries to more clearly communicate the details and developments of her journey. [I note also that neither one of us is trying to get rid of our Western orientation, or to desert it — but to understand it more fully.]