“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have an example in point. A young man I will call Joe wrote Ruburt a letter. He left his home in San Francisco to travel to India to study with a guru. He has been told that sexual desire mitigates against spiritual illumination. His home program involves him with no sex whatsoever. Joe tries desperately to abstain. At the same time, when he meditates and alters his consciousness, he immediately finds himself with a blinding headache, images of nude women, and fantasies of female goddesses out to tempt him from his celibate state.

(11:46 P.M. Break turned out to mark the end of the session, though. Jane was surprised at the time; she’d been in trance for over an hour. “My God — he’s got the whole thing all laid out,” she exclaimed. She too had been bothered by the rush and clatter of traffic, even in trance, and we talked about moving to quieter surroundings before next summer.⁴

1. In Note 1 for Session 715, I described my “first and second Romans” — internal visions or perceptions that had come to me as I lay down for afternoon naps last Sunday and Monday. Each time I’d evidently seen myself as a Roman military officer living early in the first century A.D. In the first episode I was aboard a galley in the Mediterranean; in the second, I floated face down in that sea with my hands bound behind me.

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.”)