“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.

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.

(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.

If you take your own world view with you all of the time, however, as you travel, even in your own world, then you never see the “naked culture.” You are always a tourist, taking your homey paraphernalia with you and afraid to give it up. If you are American or English, or European, then when you visit other areas of the world you stay at cosmopolitan hotels. You always see other cultures through your own eyes.

These will be relatively meaningless, however, if you do not learn how to examine them. They are not to be simply filed away and forgotten. You should write down a description of each scene and what you remember of it, including your feelings both at the time of the dream, and later when you record it. The very effort to take this camera with you makes you more of a conscious explorer, and automatically helps you to expand your own awareness while you are in the dream state. Each picture will serve as just one small glimpse of a different kind of reality. You cannot make any valid judgment on the basis of one or two pictures alone.

(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.

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

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.)

Next, I ask myself how such a marvelously structured being can think of its image as inferior to anything, especially since we’re far from understanding it even on a “mere” physical basis, let alone from any sort of nonphysical standpoint. Jane’s own abilities, for instance, raise questions about certain biological attributes as well as mental ones; in large part our society still doesn’t want to contend with such challenges at this time.

Yet, the awe I invariably feel when I study a microphotograph of the retina of the eye, magnified “only” 20,000 times, is hardly an unalloyed blessing. For next I wonder how the human creature, whose bodily components each possess such a ceaseless, rational integrity, can often function so irrationally as a whole, through the creation of war, poverty, pollution, disease, and so forth. Jane and I hope that her work with Seth is offering insights into these enormous questions about our species’ individual and collective behavior. Surely we don’t think that atoms or cells, or livers or eyeballs, are irrational.