“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) It might help here if you imagine the psyche again as some multidimensional living television set. In what seems to be the small space of the screen many programs are going on, though you can tune in to only one at a time.

In a manner of speaking, however, all of the other programs are “latent” in the one you are watching. There are coordinates that unite them all. There is a give-and-take quite invisible to you between one program and another, and action within one, again, affects the action within each of the others.

Like this imaginary multidimensional television, the psyche contains within it other programs than the one in which you are acting — other plots, environments, and world situations. Theoretically you can indeed momentarily “walk out of” your program into another as easily, when you know how, as you now move from one room to another. You must know that the other programs exist or the possibility of such action will not occur to you. In larger terms all of the programs are but portions of one, colon: The various sets are real, however, and the characters quite alive.

Think again of the psyche in the manner mentioned, taking it for granted that the program now on the screen is a fully dimensioned reality, and that hidden somehow in its very elements are all of the other programs not showing. These are not lined up in space behind the “front” program, but in a completely different way contained within it. The point of any image at any given time in the picture showing might represent, for example, a top hat on a table. Everyone acting in that scene would view the hat and the table, and react accordingly with their own individual characteristics.

Give us a moment … The hat on the table, while possessing all of the necessary paraphernalia of reality for that scene, might also, however, serve as a different kind of reference point for one of the other programs simultaneously occurring. In that reality, say program two, the entire configuration of hat and table may be meaningless, while still being interpreted in an entirely different way from a quite different perspective. There in program two the table might be a flat natural plain, and the hat an oddly shaped structure upon it — a natural rather than a manufactured one. Objects in your reality have an entirely different aspect in another. Any of the objects shown in the program you are watching, then, may be used as a different kind of reference point in another reality, in which those objects appear as something else.

(Slowly:) The simple picture of the universe that you see on our screen, therefore, represents a view from your own now perspective — but each star, planet, galaxy or whatever is made up of other reference points in which, to put it simply, the same patterns have different kinds of reality. True space travel would of course be time-space travel,⁵ in which you learned how to use points in your own universe as “dimensional clues” that would serve as entry points into other worlds. Otherwise you are simply flying like an insect around the outside of the television set, trying to light on the fruit, say, that is shown upon the screen — and wondering, like a poor bemused fly, why you cannot. You use one main focus in your reality. In the outside world this means that you have a “clear picture.” (Humorously:) There is no snow! That physical program is the one you are acting in, alive in, and it is the one shown on the screen. The screen is the part of your psyche upon which you are concentrating. You not only tune in the picture but you also create the props, the entire history of the life and times, hyphen — but in living three-dimensional terms, and “you” are within that picture.

Give us time … When you change your ordinary television set from one station to another you may encounter snow or distortion. If something is wrong with the set you may simply tune in patterns that seem meaningless and carry no particular program. You may have sound without a picture, and sometimes even a picture but sound from another program. So when you begin to experiment with states of altered consciousness you often run into the same kind of phenomena, when nothing seems to make sense.

Men have also visited other worlds through the ages. Others have visited your world. In dreams, and in altered states through history as you accept it, men have been taken upon such journeys. On their return they almost always interpreted their experiences in terms of their home programs, intertwining what happened into what ended up as great myths and stories — real but not real.

There are times in history when the species deals with different kinds of challenges. In programmed societies where “each man or woman knows his or her place,” then the will knows which directions to follow, though other conditions and prerogatives might be ignored. Actually, in your own society there are many prerogatives….