“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In Note 1, I described my third “Roman,” which took place this afternoon. (“I guess I’m confused,” Jane said as we waited for the session to begin. “I think Seth’s going to start another section tonight — but I don’t think he’s quite finished with the last one….” However, Section 4 was finished after all.)

This section will deal with various methods that will allow you to come in contact with the unknown reality to one extent or another. We have spoken of probable man, hinted at probable civilizations, and mentioned alternate systems of actuality.² Yet these do not exist completely apart from the world that you know, or entirely cut off from the psyche. If you have no experience with such realities, then their existence remains delightful or speculative conjecture.

(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.

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

(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.

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.

Let the unity disappear as far as your conscious thought is concerned. No longer connect up the sounds you hear with their corresponding objects. Make no attempt to unify vision and hearing. Drop the package, as it were, as a unified group of perceptions. The previous clarity of the moment will have changed into something else. Take one sound if you want to, say of a passing car, and with your eyes closed follow the sound in your mind. Keep your eyes closed. Become aware of whatever perceptions reach you, but this time do not judge or evaluate. Then in a flash open your eyes, alert your body, and try to bring all of your perceptions together again as brilliantly and clearly as possible.

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.

Even your home station has many programs, and you have usually tuned in to one main one and ignored others. Characters in your “favorite program” at home may appear in far different guises when you are between stations, and elements of other programs that you have ignored at home may suddenly become apparent to you.

(11:34. “No,” I said again, in answer to Seth-Jane’s obvious concern. It was a warm night for the end of October, and we had the windows open, the traffic noise from the busy intersection just one house removed was bothering me more than anything else.)

As I prepared to sleep this afternoon I had my third vision in the series. Presumably this will be the last one — for now, closely following upon my precarious circumstance in the water, I saw myself as dead. When I woke up I made another little drawing: I showed my Roman-captain self still face down in the water, but entangled with the branches projecting from a waterlogged tree trunk — I’d been caught that way for a while, before a group of fishermen on a North American beach hauled body and tree ashore in their net. At least, I thought as I described the experience to Jane, I dared face my death in that life after the fact of its happening, even if I didn’t care to undergo the actual process.

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.”)