“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.

You are familiar with your own view of the world. As you leave your usual orientation, however, altering the focus of your consciousness, you may very well structure your new experience just as you do your physical one. At the same time, you are more free. You have greater leeway. You are used to projecting your beliefs onto physical objects and events. When you leave your home station, those objects and events no longer present themselves in the same fashion.

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.

Now when you leave your home station and alter your consciousness, you are always a tourist if you take your own baggage of ideas along with you, and interpret your experiences through your own personal, cultural beliefs. There is nothing unconventional about gods and demons, good spirits or bad spirits. These are quite conventional interpretations of experience, with religious overtones. Cults simply represent counter-conventions, and they are as dogmatic in their way as the systems they reject. Underline that sentence.

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.