“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) The unknown reality is a variation of the one that you know, so that many of its features are latent rather than predominant in your own private and mass experience. Any encounter with such phenomena will then include a bringing-into-focus of elements that are usually not concentrated upon. Your consciousness must learn to organize itself in more than one fashion — or rather, you must be willing to allow your consciousness to use itself more fully. It is not necessarily a matter of trying to ignore the contents of the world, or to deny your physical perception. Instead, the trick is to view the contents of the world in different fashions, to free your physical senses from the restraints that your mental conventions have placed upon them.

In order to begin, you must first become familiar with the working of your own consciousness as it is directed toward the physical world. You cannot know when you are in focus with another reality if you do not even realize what it feels like to be in full focus with your own. Many people phase in and out of that state without being aware of it, and others are able to keep track of their own “inner drifting.” Here, simple daydreaming represents a slight shift of awareness out of directly given sense data.

You will not learn it by trying to escape your own reality, or by attempting to dull your senses. This can only teach you what it means not to focus, and in whatever reality you visit the ability to focus clearly and well is a prerequisite. Once you learn how to really tune in, then you will understand what it means to change the direction of your focus.

One of the simplest exercises is hardly an original one, but it is of great benefit.

Try to experience all of your present sense data as fully as you can. This tones your entire physical and psychic organism, bringing all of your perceptions together so that your awareness opens fully. Body and mind operate together. You experience an immediate sense of power because your abilities are directed to the fullest of their capacities. In a physical moment you can act directly on the spot, so to speak.

Take as much time as you want to with this exercise. It places you in your universe clearly. This is an excellent exercise to use before you begin — and after you finish with — any experiment involving an alteration of consciousness.

(10:19. Jane’s delivery had been quite a bit faster than usual — which means she’d kept me writing at a steady pace even though I was recording the material with my homemade “shorthand.” She said she felt that in this section Seth would have a series of exercises related to the one he’d just given, these would help people glimpse at least some of the alternate or probable realities discussed in Section 4.

When you are using this exercise following any experiment with an alteration of consciousness, then end it here and go about your other concerns. You may also utilize it as an initial step that will help you get the feeling of your own inner mobility. To do this proceed as given, and when you have the moment’s perception as clearly as possible, then willfully let it go.

When you have the sense world before you this time, let it climax, so to speak, then again close your eyes and let it fall away. Do not focus. In fact, unfocus. Period.

As you go about your day, try now and then to recapture that point and to bring all data into the clearest possible brilliance. You will find that this practice, continued, will vastly enrich your normal experience. You find it much easier to concentrate, to attend. To attend is to pay attention and take care of. So this exercise will allow you to attend — to focus your awareness to the matters at hand as clearly and vividly as possible. The subjective knowledge of your own point of finest focus will also serve as a reference point for many other exercises.

Exercise two [in the session]. For your benefit, Joseph, this entire section will be made up of practice elements, with comments and directions.

You must work from your own subjective experience, so when you find your own finest focus point, that is your clearest reception for your own home station. You may feel that it has a certain position in your inner vision, or in your head, or you may find that you have your own symbol to represent it. You might imagine it, if you want to, as a station indicator on your own radio or television set, but your subjective recognition of it is your own cue.

In our just-previous exercise, when I spoke of having you let your clear perception drop away, and told you to disconnect vision from hearing, you were drifting in terms of your own home station. Your consciousness was straying. This time begin with the point of your own finest focus, which you have established, then let your consciousness stray as given. Only let it stray in a particular direction — to the right or the left, whichever seems most natural to you. In this way you are still directing it and learning to orient yourself. In the beginning, 15 minutes at most for this exercise; but let your awareness drift in whatever direction you have chosen.

Do not be impatient. As you continue with this exercise over a period of time you will be able to go further away, orienting yourself as you grow more familiar with the feeling of your mind. Gradually you will discover that this inner sense data will become clearer and clearer as you move toward another “station.” It will represent reality as perceived from a different state of consciousness.

The first journey from one home station to another, unfamiliar one may bring you in contact with various kinds of bleed-throughs, distortions, or static. These can be expected. They are simply the result of not yet learning how to tune your own consciousness clearly in to other kinds of focus. Before you can pick up the “next” station, for example, you may see ghost images in your mind, or pick up distorted versions from your own home station. You have momentarily dispensed with the usual, habitual organizational process by which you unite regular physical sense perceptions, so while you are “between stations,” you may well encounter mixed signals from each. When you alter your conscious focus in such a fashion, you are also moving away from the part of your psyche that you consider its center. You are journeying through your own psyche, in other words, for different realities are different states of the psyche — materialized, projected outward and experienced. That applies to your home station or physical world as well.