“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.

When you travel into such realms you usually do so from the dream state, still carrying your private symbols with you. Even here, these are automatically translated into experience. This is not your own codified system, however. You may journey through such a reality, perceiving it opaquely, layering it over with your own perceived symbols, and taking those for the “real” environment. In these terms the real environment will be that which was generally perceived by the natural inhabitants of the system.

(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.

Instinctively you leave your body for varying amounts of time each night while you sleep, but those journeys are not “programmed.” You plan your own tours, in other words. As many people with the same interests may decide to visit the same country together, on tour, so in the out-of-body condition you may travel alone or with companions. If you are alert you may even take snapshots — only as far as inner tours are concerned, the snapshots consist of clear pictures of the environment taken at the time, developed in the unconscious, and then presented to the waking mind.

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.

Before a trip, you can produce travel folders that outline the attractions and characteristics of a certain locale. You are not traveling blind, therefore, and while any given journey may be new to you, you are not really a pioneer: The land has been mapped and there are few basic surprises.

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.

(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.