“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.

Each particular “station” of consciousness perceives in a different kind of reality, and as mentioned earlier (in Session 711, for instance), you usually tune in to your home station most of the time. If you turn your focus only slightly away, the world appears differently; and if that slightly altered focus were the predominant one, then that is how the world would seem to be. Each aspect of the psyche perceives the reality upon which it is focused, and that reality is also the materialization of a particular state of the psyche projected outward. You can learn to encounter other realities by altering your position within your own psyche.

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.

If you listen to an FM radio station, there is a handy lock-in gadget that automatically keeps the station in clear focus; it stops the program from “drifting.” In the same way, when you daydream you drift away from your home station, while still relating to it, generally speaking. You also have the mental equivalent, however, of the FM’s lock-in mechanism. On your part this is the result of training, so that if your thoughts or experience stray too far this mental gadget brings them back into line. Usually this is automatic — a learned response that by now appears to be almost instinctive. Period.

You must learn to use this mechanism consciously for your own purposes, for it is extremely handy. Many of you do not pay attention to your own experience, subjectively speaking, so you drift in and out of clear focus in this reality, barely realizing it. Often your daily program is not nearly as clear or well-focused as it should be, but full of static; and while this may annoy you, you often put up with it or even become so used to the lack of harmony that you forget what a clear reception is like. However, in this world you are surrounded by familiar objects, details, and ideas, and your main orientation is physical so that you can operate through habit alone even when you are not as well focused within your reality as you should be.

(9:56.) When you go traveling off into other systems, however, you cannot depend upon your habits. Indeed, often they can only add to your mental clutter, turning into “static” — so you must learn first of all what a clear focus is.

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.

Now: Bring all of those sensations together. Try to be aware of all of them at once, so that one adds to the others. If you find yourself being more concerned with one particular perception, then make an attempt to bring the ignored ones to the same clear focus. Let all of them together form a brilliant awareness of the moment.

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.

When you have done this often enough so that you are intimately aware of the contrast, you will have a subjective feeling, a point of knowing within yourself, that will clearly indicate to you how your consciousness feels when it is at its finest point of focus in physical reality.

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.

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.

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.

In your home station, events are encountered clearly in space and time. When you move away, however, you may meet events in time but not in space, and reality that you have tried to deny may then appear vividly. If you understand this you can gain immeasurably, for as you move your focus away from your organized reality, other portions of it upon which you have not concentrated will come into view.