“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.

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.

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.

And added later: Jane did use my three Roman experiences in her Psychic Politics; she’d mentioned doing so after the second one had taken place, and ended up quoting my own accounts of them in Chapter 4. (As I wrote up my third vision, incidentally, I called myself “captain,” automatically using present-day terminology to denote a certain military rank Then I began to wonder if such a classification had even existed in the Roman armed forces in those ancient times. I learned that it had: A captain was called a “centurio.”)