“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

In any case, in your private life you may hardly ever encounter your belief in your own unworth, or evil. You will not realize that you actually consider yourself the enemy. You will be so convinced that your projection (onto others) is the enemy that there will be no slack to take up, for all of your feelings of self-hate or self-fear will be directed outward.

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.

(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.)

Now this is a mental camera we are using. There is a knack about being a good dream photographer, and you must learn how to operate the camera. In physical life, for example, a photographer knows that many conditions affect the picture he takes. Exterior situations then are important: You might get a very poor picture on a dark day, for instance. With our dream camera, however, the conditions themselves are mental. If you are in a dark mood, for example, then your picture of inner reality might be dim, poorly outlined, or foreboding. This would not necessarily mean that the dream itself had tragic overtones, simply that it was taken in the “poor light” of the psyche’s mood.

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.

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.

(11:56 P.M. Seth’s comments on my experience certainly illustrate his notions of simultaneous time to some extent, since from my “present” I perceived aspects of myself in the reincarnational “past” as well as in the “future” in this life. See Note 4.

(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.

Finally, the incredibly complex physical assemblage of the human being — or of any organism, to confine ourselves to just “living” entities — always reminds me that according to evolutionary theory life on earth arose by chance alone. We must remember that through Darwinism or Neo-Darwinism science tells us that life has no creative design, or any purpose, behind it; and that, moreover, this ineffable quality called “life” originated (more than 3.4 billion years ago) in a single fortuitous chance combination of certain atoms and molecules in a tidal pool, say, somewhere on the face of the planet….