“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In that previous book I discussed the ways in which you form your private experience through your beliefs. You have certain pet ideas, therefore, and you use them to structure your own world view of the reality you know. It is important that you understand what your own beliefs are. Many of them might work quite well “at home,” but when you begin to journey away from that home station you may find that those same ideas impede your progress.

When you begin to leave your home station and alter your focus, however, you leave behind you the particular familiar receptors for your projections. Using the Ouija board or automatic writing, you may find yourself immediately confronted with this material that you have suppressed in the past. When it surfaces you may then project it outward from yourself again, but in a different fashion. Instead of thinking you are in contact with a great philosopher or “ancient soul,” you may believe that you are instead visiting with a demon or a devil, or that you are possessed of an evil spirit.

If you are normally capable of dealing with physical reality, you will encounter no difficulties in alterations of consciousness, or leaving your home station. Be reasonable, however: If you have difficulties in New York City, you are most apt to encounter them in a different form no matter where else you might travel. A change of environment might help clear your head by altering your usual orientation, so that you can see yourself more clearly, and benefit. The same applies when you leave your home station. Here the possible benefits are far greater than in usual life and travel, but you are still yourself. It is impossible not to structure reality in some fashion. Reality implies a structuring.

(10:37. Jane’s delivery had been rather fast throughout, except for an occasional long pause. She felt more alert now, she said, but still wasn’t as wide-awake as usual. She’d been taking a little wine during her trance. At her request I got her a glass of milk — which she didn’t finish before Seth returned.

(During break I saw a certain look pass across Jane’s tired face. I couldn’t describe the expression, but it reminded me of the internal “vision” I’d had this afternoon when I lay down to sleep: I found myself looking at a very old, very probable future manifestation of myself in this life, who rested quietly in bed. Just before supper tonight I finished writing an account of what I’d seen, and Jane read it while we ate. See Note 4. Now as we discussed the event in a little more detail, I made a quick sketch of that possible self of mine.

(Still in trance, Jane set the milk aside. She didn’t return to it, but sipped her wine for the rest of the session. I was tempted to ask Seth to explain his idea of what good milk was like, and in what life [or lives] he’d enjoyed such a potion, but I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the material. While tasting the milk during break, however, Jane “herself” had had no such reaction.)

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 here is another brief but potent exercise.

(But the big thing is finding the physical time to try everything I’d like to do — just as it is with Jane.)

4. I lay down for a nap as usual at 4:30 this afternoon (Monday, November 11). As I started drifting toward sleep I became aware that I was looking at my own head; the image lasted for several seconds and was quite clear, without being needle-sharp. My view was from my right side as I lay face up on the cot. This is a bit difficult to describe, but the glimpse of my own head came from a point usually invisible to me — centered perhaps two inches or so above and behind my right ear.

I saw the head of a very old man, in his late 80’s or early 90’s. I had no doubt that this was a definitely probable version of myself in this reality. How strange to peek at the curve of my own skull from that odd viewpoint. I saw short, almost wispy white hair, but I wasn’t bald. Through the hair I could see the pulsing bluish veins in the skin as it lay over the bone — and in some fashion this sight alone was most evocative of the very young and the very old. I lay face up, bony arms folded across my chest, just as my present “me” did. I knew that I was resting, and that I wasn’t senile. I don’t believe I was bedridden, but that I was being cared for somehow.