“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Upon the blackboard, in this homey analogy, would be written the soul’s earthly experiences. With the eraser the “evil hand” would try to rub out all of the good, and at the same time the “good hand” would be trying to erase all of the evil. In such a case all of your experience becomes suspect. You will have a tendency to consider the body with its natural appetites wrong, and deny them, while at the same time the physical part of you will look upon your “good intents” as wrong, and infringements upon its own existence.

(Intently:) You often find yourself encountering your own structures, no longer hidden in the kind of experience with which you are familiar. These may then appear in quite a different light. You may be convinced that you are evil simply because you are physical. You may believe that the soul “descends” into the body, and therefore that the body is lower, inferior, and a degraded version of “what you really are.” At the same time your own physical being knows better, and basically cannot accept such a concept.² So in daily life you may project this idea of unworth outward onto another person, who seems then to be your enemy; or upon another nation. In general, you might select animals to play the part of the enemy, or members of another religion, or political parties.

Your alterations of consciousness frequently occur in the dream state, therefore, where it seems to you at least that your experiences do not have any practical application. You imagine that only hallucinations are involved. Many of your best snapshots of other realities are taken in your dreams.⁵ They may be over-or-underdeveloped, and the focus may be blurred, but your dreams present you with far more information about the unknown reality than you suppose. In the most intimate of terms your body is your home station, so when you leave it you often hide this fact from yourselves.

In your sleep, however, your consciousness slips out of your body and returns to it frequently. You dream when you are out of your body, even as you dream inside it. You may therefore form dream stories about your own out-of-body travel, while your physical image rests soundly in bed. The unknown reality, you see, is not really that mysterious to you. You only pretend that it is. Sometimes you have quite clear perceptions of your journeys, but the actual native territories that you visit are so different from your own world that you try to interpret them as best you can in the light of usual conditions. If you remember such an episode at all it may well seem very confusing, for you will have superimposed your own world view where it does not belong.

Now: It represented two things: An association with a definite past old-age sensation, and a “precognitive” moment in this life that you have not as yet encountered. Because you were [psychically] open, the position of your body and head acted as the associative bridge between the two events. You were not senile in either.

2. When I come across material that puts down the physical body, I sometimes try to counter such negative projections by turning to one of the technological accomplishments of our “degraded” species: I study photographs of minute portions of the human body, taken with a scanning electron microscope. Then I experience a series of steps in thinking — not all of them good, I’m afraid — and I’d like to mention each one in turn.

At this writing, an electron microscope can magnify the surfaces of tissue samples from 20,000 to 60,000 times. Always the resulting photographs obtained leave me groping as I try to appreciate the beauty, order, and complexity of the human organism at just the greatly enlarged levels shown. (If we could plunge “down” into the body’s molecular and atomic stages, and see those, we’d find intricacies that are even more unbelievable.)

7. See the 710th session for Seth’s material on dreams, and the “snapshots” the conscious mind can learn to take during out-of-body travel.