“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The unknown reality and the psyche’s greater existence cannot be separated from the intimate knowledge of the flesh, however, for the life of the flesh takes place within that framework. As earlier mentioned,⁴ the conscious self generally focuses in but one small dimension. Period. That dimension is experienced as fully as possible, its clear brilliance and exquisite focus possible only because you tune in to it and bring it to the forefront of your attention. In your terms, when you understand how to do this, then you can begin to tune in to other “stations” as well.

(Pause at 9:59.) At one time these postcards represented initial original visions and individual interpretations. Later, however, they began to serve as guidebooks consulted ahead of time. For instance: If you plan to travel to a distant country in your own world, you can find such publications to tell you what to expect. When you journey into other realities, or when your consciousness leaves your body, you can also rely upon guidebooks that program your activities ahead of time. Period.

Instead of telling you that you take an airplane from a certain airport at a certain time for a particular earthly destination, leaving one latitude and longitude and arriving at another set; instead of telling you that you leave your country for another ruled by a dictator, or a president, or by anarchy, they will tell you that you leave this astral plane for any one of a number of others, ruled as the case may be by lords or masters, gods and goddesses. Instead of pointing out to you, as in earthly travel booklets, the locations of art galleries and museums, they will direct you to the Akashic Records.⁶ Instead of leading you to the archaeological sites of your world (intently), and its great ruins of previous civilizations, they will tell you how to find Atlantis and Mu⁷ and other times in your past.

There are inner conventions, then, as there are outer ones. As the exterior mores try to force you to conform to the generally accepted ideas, so the interior conventions try to force you to make your inner experience conform to preconceived packaging.

There are good reasons for conventions. Generally, they help organize experience. If they are lightly held to and accepted, they can serve well as guidelines. Applied with a heavy hand they become unnecessary dogma, rigidly limiting experience. This applies to inner and outer activity. Conventions are the results of stratified and rigid “spontaneity.” At one time, in your terms, each custom had a meaning. Each represented a spontaneous gesture, an individual reaction. When these become a system of order, however, the original spontaneity is lost, and you project an artificial order that serves to stratify behavior rather than to express it. So there are psychic customs as there are physical ones, religious and psychic dogmas, guided tours of consciousness in which you are told to follow a certain line or a certain program. You become afraid of your private interpretation of whatever reality you find yourself experiencing.

(Long pause.) Once individual travelers took those snapshots, and they represented original interpretations of other realities. They stood for individual versions of certain travelers taking brief glimpses of strange worlds, and interpreting their experiences to the best of their abilities. As such they were very valid. (Louder:) They were as valid as any snapshot that you might take of your backyard in the morning. That picture, however, would vary considerably from one taken by an inhabitant of your planet in a different part of the world, and in a different environment.

First of all, in your own world those travelers into unknown realms were considered outcasts, so to speak, as if they were picking up television programs that no one else saw.⁸ If their stories of their experiences did not jibe, who would believe them? They felt threatened. They felt that they had to tell the same story or they would be considered insane, so they made a tacit agreement, interpreting their experiences in the terms used by those who had gone “before.”

Give us a moment … Individually and en masse, you form the world that you know, yet it has an overall individual and mass basis so that some things are agreed upon. You view those things through your own unique vision. You form the reality. It is a valid one. It is experience. It is not therefore unreal, but one of the appearances that reality takes. It has a valid basis — an environment that you all accept, in which certain experiences are possible.

(10:58.) “Sounds are aware of their own separateness, gloriously unique, yet each one merging into a symphony. Each sound recognizes itself as itself, striking the dimensional medium in which it finds its expression; yet it’s aware of the infinite other multitudinous sounds it makes in other realities — the instruments through which it so grandly plays. Each cell, c-e-l-l, strikes in the same fashion, and so does each self; s-e-l-f, in a kaleidoscope in which each slightest variation has meaning and affects the individual notes made by all.

“So we strike in more realities than one, and I hear those notes together yet separately, perhaps as raindrops, and attempt to put them together and yet hear each separate note….

(Except for a few instances in which I eliminated repetitive phrases, all of the material Jane gave after 10:47 is unchanged here. At times, because her delivery had become so steady, even precise, I’d wondered if she had entered into a Seth trance, but one without Seth’s usual voice effects. I had also been concerned lest she speak so rapidly that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with her in my notes, but that hadn’t happened. Nor had she spoken for Seth, I realized by the time she finished. Her enhanced state of consciousness had been her “own.”

(Much of Jane’s day had been made up of a series of altered, and at times even near-ecstatic states of consciousness, each one expressing a unique and creative facet of her essentially mystical nature.¹⁰ Even though not at her best, she’d been able to draw upon lavish amounts of energy. I think that her experience with inner sound after the session represented her interpretation of the information Seth gave on feeling-tones, some two years ago; see the 613th session for Chapter 1 of Personal Reality. There are certainly deep connections between Jane’s apprehension of her true tone, and Seth’s statement in that session that each of us possesses certain qualities of feeling uniquely our own, “… that are like deep musical chords.” He went on to say at 10:06: “These feeling-tones, then, pervade your being They are the form your spirit takes when combined with flesh.” I also think that Jane’s sensing of her true path reflects her understanding of Seth’s subsequent remark at 10:16 [in that 613th session]: “The feeling-tone is the motion and fiber — and timbre — of your energy devoted to your physical experience.¹¹

(And she’s quite conscious of the fact that her massive sensations are one of the ways by which, as she has written, she tries to “view our three-dimensional existence and this universe from outside this framework” or to travel beyond the conventionalized psychic postcards.

Occasionally we’ll meet one or more of our secondhand detractors. Then of course we’re greeted with polite smiles; the conversation may touch upon the weather, but hardly ever upon matters psychic. Sometimes we’ll discover that the “knowledge” of us held by the skeptic(s) in question is so far removed from our actual beliefs and activities that it would take us a very long time to establish any real understanding among all involved — if it would be possible to begin with, that is. We always elect to pass up such “opportunities.”