“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane was so relaxed and “floppy” before the session that I asked her if she’d rather not have it. She decided that she wanted to try. She’s been experiencing many muscular changes and releases in recent days. I read parts of the last session to her, to remind us both of what Seth had discussed. At 9:30 Jane said: “There — I’m just beginning to feel him around….”)

— and dictation. I consider my own book, The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book, as a prerequisite for the exercises given here in this volume.

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.

Other concepts are really not basically workable even in your own physical reality. A rigid, dogmatic concept of good and evil will force you to perceive physical existence as a battleground of opposing forces, with the poor unwary soul almost as a buffer. Or you will think of the poor soul as a blackboard eraser, slapped between two hands — one good and one evil.

(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 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.

Different varieties of dreams often provide frameworks that allow you to leave your own world view under “cushioned conditions.” You step out of the normal picture that you have made of reality.

(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.

(11:16.) In dream travel it is quite possible to journey to other civilizations — those in your past or future, or even to worlds whose reality exists in other probable systems. There is even a kind of “cross-breeding,” for you affect any system of reality with which you have experience. There are no closed realities, only apparent boundaries that seem to separate them.⁶ The more parochial your own world view, however, the less you will recall of their dreams or their activities, or the more distorted your “dream snapshots” will be.

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.

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.

(“What about my little view of myself this afternoon, as a very old man?”)

(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.

1. In Personal Reality, see the 636th session in Chapter 9, and much of the material in the four sessions making up Chapter 12.

3. In Volume 1 of “Unknown” Reality, Seth incorporated the use of photographs in practice elements 3–5 and 7.

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.