“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If an inhabitant from another reality outside of your own physical system entirely were to visit it, and if “his” intelligence was roughly of the same degree as your own, he would still have to learn to focus his consciousness in the same way that you do, more or less, in order to perceive your world. He would have to alter his native focus and turn it in a direction that was foreign to him. In this way he could “pick up your station.”¹ There would be distortions, because even though he managed such manipulations he might not have the same kind of native physical structure as your own, of course, through which to receive and interpret those data his altered consciousness perceived.

New paragraph. While all of your own thoughts and feelings are “somewhere” materialized, only some of them become physical in your terms. They are then accepted as physical reality. They provide the basis for the physical events, objects, and phenomena upon which you all agree. Therefore your world has a stability that you accept, a certain order and predictability³ that works well enough for daily concerns. At that point you are tuned in precisely on your “home station.” You ignore the ghost symbols or voices, the probable actions that also occur, but that are muffled in the clear tones of your accepted reality. When you begin to travel away from that home station, you become more aware of the other frequencies⁴ that are buried within it. You move through other frequencies, but to do this you must alter your own consciousness.*

Now all consciousness, including your own, is highly mobile. While you focus your attention primarily in your own world, certain portions of your consciousness are always straying. When you are sleeping, then, your consciousness often ventures into other realities, usually in a wandering fashion without tuning itself in to any precise frequencies. Beneath many seemingly chaotic dreams there are often valid experiences in which your consciousness “lights” in another reality, without being attuned to it with the necessary precision that would allow for clear perception. The information cannot be sifted or used effectively and is translated into dream images, as your consciousness returns toward your own home station. Therefore, it has been difficult to achieve any kind of clear picture of such other realities.

New paragraph. Basically, however, consciousness is freewheeling. Such realities therefore always exist — in your own psyche — outside of your “home station,” and some portion of your own consciousness is always involved in them. Period. There are bleed-throughs, so to speak, in the form of unofficial perceptions that often occur, or “impossible” events that are seemingly beyond explanation. (Pause.) For now think of your own psyche, which is a consciousized identity, as a kind of “supernatural radio.” All of the stations exist at once within the psyche. These do not come through with sound alone, but with all the living paraphernalia of the world. The “you” that you recognize is but one signal on one such station, tuned in to a certain frequency, experiencing that station’s overall reality from your own viewpoint — one that is unique and like no other, and yet contributing to the whole life of the station.

(Smile:) The supernatural radio that is your entire psyche contains many such stations, however. These are all playing at the same time. It would be highly confusing in this analogy to experience or hear all of these at once, however, so different portions of the psyche tune in to different stations, concentrate upon them, and tune out the others for immediate practical purposes. Because these stations all operate within the same psyche or supernatural radio, the overall quality of the programs will have much to do with the nature of the psyche itself. Radios are wired and contain transformers and transistors. The overall reception is dependent upon the wiring and the inner workings of the radio — and (intently) those workings exist apart from the stations they are meant to pick up. In the same way, the “supernatural psyche” exists apart from the stations of consciousness that it contains. In this case indeed the psyche itself makes the radio, adding ever-new connections and stations.

(10:18.) New paragraph. Pretend that you have a radio with which you can clearly pick up 10 stations. First imagine that during the daily programming there are three soap operas, four news programs, several excellent dramas, a few operas, some popular music, several religious sermons, and some sports programs. Each of these has its own commercials or messages, which may or may not have anything to do with the programs given.

For example: Say that you have a certain Wilford Jones, who is a character in one of the soap operas. This Wilford, while carrying on within his own drama as, say, a sickly grocer in Iowa, with a mistress he cannot support, and a wife that he must support (with amusement) — this poor, besieged man on station KYU is also aware of all the other programs going on at the other stations. All of the other characters in all of the other plays are also aware of our grocer. There is a constant, creative give-and-take between the day’s various programs. Period.

When our Wilford dramatically cries out to his mistress: “I am afraid my wife will learn of our affair,” then the symphony playing on another station becomes melodramatic, and the sports program shows that a hero fumbles the football. Yet each character has its own free will. The football player, unconsciously picking up the grocer’s problem, for example, may use it as a challenge and say: “No, I will not fumble the ball.” The crowds then cheer, and our grocer in his soap opera may smile and say: “But it will all work out after all.”

In other words, there is in the psyche constant interaction between all of the stations, and marvelous, literally unlimited creativity — in which, in your terms, all actions in one station affect all others in the other stations.

(Pause at 11:13.) To some extent, signals from all of the other stations are always in the background of any given program, and by momentarily altering the direction of your own attention you can learn how to bring other stations into focus. Psychically and psychologically, those other stations upon which you do not concentrate form the structure of the psyche as you understand it, from which your earthly experience springs into focus. Studying yourself and the nature of your own consciousness, then, will automatically lead you to some extent to an understanding of the “unknown” reality. The unknown reality is composed of those blocked-out portions of your own psyche, and the corresponding frameworks of experience they form.

(Long pause.) New paragraph. For the sake of imagery, you can imagine your normal consciousness as your connection with this home planet — the familiar station that you tune in to every day. When you project your consciousness away from it, then you will encounter various kinds of atmospheric conditions. Once you understand what these are, and what effects can be expected, such journeys can be undertaken consciously, with the conscious mind that you know acting as the astronaut, for example, and the rest of your consciousness acting as the vehicle. Such journeys lead to quite valid realities, but as an astronaut must know the best landing conditions, so you must learn how to “come in” at the most auspicious time and under the best conditions.

Your experience of yourself marks the seeming boundaries of yourself. In a manner of speaking, I am one personality and one program or station. Ruburt is another. We have learned to be aware of each other* to communicate between stations, to affect each other’s programs and to change each other’s worlds. I do not speak alone to Ruburt and Joseph, for example, but my words go out to the world that you know. Still within your framework, Ruburt tunes in to another station, translates it and broadcasts the information. To do this, however, he has to alter his own consciousness, withdraw momentarily from the official station to bring in this one. That means tuning in to other portions of the psyche, as well as another kind of reality. The final translation of my material has to come through his organism, however, or it would be meaningless to you.

Ruburt does extremely well with interior sound, and so I use that method rather than, say, an image to make my independent existence known. Now Ruburt called me originally (last Saturday night) at unconscious levels because he was upset with “earth programming.” He thought that you needed some help from the outside, so to speak. That intent set up certain signals that reached into other realities or stations, and I answered. I was not speaking to Ruburt personally when he heard me, but addressing myself to the world at large in a program that was indeed picked up by others.

(12:21.) These characters become portions of the inner literature of the mind. Suppose an inhabitant from another reality saw [one of those three programs] and realized that people were watching it. Pretend he wanted to add more depth to the show. He might then come on himself in the guise of [the hero detective], but enlarging upon the characterization, adding more dimension to the plot. So, often when some personality from another station wants to help change the programming, he comes on in the form of a personality already known in fact or fiction. However, you must realize that that personality is larger than fact or fiction. “It” is independent at its own level, yet it is also a part of the portion of the private and mass psyche that is so represented.

1. A note added later: Seth puts the “home station of consciousness”‘ analogy to good use in several more sessions for this volume. See the 716th session in Section 5, for instance.