“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.

(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.

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.

Give us a moment … When you try these exercises, therefore, make an honest attempt to leave your conventional ideas behind you. Step out of your own world view. There is an exercise that will help you.

(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.)

Many people, however, remembering a dark dream, become frightened. You even structure your dreams, of course. For that matter, your dream world is as varied as the physical one. Each physical photographer has an idea of what he wants to capture on film, and so to that extent he structures his picture and his view. The same applies to the dream state. You have all kinds of dreams. You can take what you want, so to speak, from dream reality, as basically you take what you want from waking life. For that reason, your dream snapshots will show you the kind of experience that you are choosing from inner reality.

(In ordinary terms I can only wait, of course, to see if I decide to create that distant probable moment in this reality. In the meantime, I have no conscious memory of being an old man, let alone one in the specific, dependent situation in which I saw myself: However, aside from the idea of simultaneous time, I do believe that an individual can touch upon at least some of his or her earlier lives, provided enough long-term effort is given to the endeavor. Since through my internal vision I evidently looked in upon a particular past life of my own, however unaware I was of what I was doing, it seems that the knowledge of that existence may not be too deeply buried within my psyche. I might try jogging my memory through suggestion, to see what else about that life I can recall. It would also be interesting to see whether the same technique could help me tune in to my future in this life.