“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Sit with your eyes open easily, letting your vision take in whatever is before you. Do not strain. On the other hand, do explore the entire field of vision simultaneously. Listen to everything. Identify all the sounds if you can, mentally placing them with the objects to which they correspond even though the objects may be invisible. Sit comfortably but make no great attempt to relax. Instead, feel your body in an alert manner — not in a sleepy distant fashion. Be aware of its pressure against the chair, for example, and of its temperature, of variations: Your hands may be warm and your feet cold, or your belly hot and your head cold. Consciously, then, feel your body’s sensations. Is there any taste in your mouth? What odors do you perceive?

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.

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.

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.

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.”)