“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You know where physical reality is, then, on the dial of your multidimensional television set. While focused within that living scene you can learn to travel through it, leaving the “surface” picture intact and whole. In a way you program yourself, going about your daily duties as conscientiously and effectively as usual — but at the same time you discover an additional portion of your own reality. This does not diminish the physical self. Instead, in fact, it enriches it. You discover that the psyche has many aspects. While fully enjoying the physical aspect you find that there is some part of you left over, so to speak; and that part can travel into other realities. It can also then return, bringing the physically oriented self “snapshots” of its journeys. These snapshots are usually interpreted in terms of your home program. Otherwise, they might make no sense to the physical self.

(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.

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.

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.”

You make your own reality. So, programmed ahead of time, they perceived [data] according to the psychic conventions that had been established. There are tigers in Asia, but you can travel through Asia and if you do not want to you’ll never see a tiger. It’s according to where you go. In the unknown reality your thoughts are instantly made apparent and real, materialized according to your beliefs. There, if you believe in demons, you will see them — without ever realizing that they are part of the environment of your psyche, formed by your beliefs, and thrown out as mirages over a very real environment that you do not perceive. You will believe the psychic tour books and go hunting for demons instead of tigers.