“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you listen to an FM radio station, there is a handy lock-in gadget that automatically keeps the station in clear focus; it stops the program from “drifting.” In the same way, when you daydream you drift away from your home station, while still relating to it, generally speaking. You also have the mental equivalent, however, of the FM’s lock-in mechanism. On your part this is the result of training, so that if your thoughts or experience stray too far this mental gadget brings them back into line. Usually this is automatic — a learned response that by now appears to be almost instinctive. Period.

You must learn to use this mechanism consciously for your own purposes, for it is extremely handy. Many of you do not pay attention to your own experience, subjectively speaking, so you drift in and out of clear focus in this reality, barely realizing it. Often your daily program is not nearly as clear or well-focused as it should be, but full of static; and while this may annoy you, you often put up with it or even become so used to the lack of harmony that you forget what a clear reception is like. However, in this world you are surrounded by familiar objects, details, and ideas, and your main orientation is physical so that you can operate through habit alone even when you are not as well focused within your reality as you should be.

Even your home station has many programs, and you have usually tuned in to one main one and ignored others. Characters in your “favorite program” at home may appear in far different guises when you are between stations, and elements of other programs that you have ignored at home may suddenly become apparent to you.

(Pause.) I will give you a simple example. At home you may tune in to religious programs. That means that you might organize your daily existence about highly idealistic principles. You may try to ignore what you consider other programs dealing with hatred, fear, or violence. You might do such a good job of organizing your physical data about your ideal that you shut out any emotions that involve fear, violence, or hatred. When you alter your consciousness, again, you automatically begin to let old organizations of data drop away. You may have tuned out what you think of as negative feelings or programming. These, however, may have been present but ignored, and when you dispense with your usual method of organizing physical data they may suddenly become apparent.

If you tell yourself that sexual feeling is wrong, and organize your daily programming in that fashion, then when you “meditate,” or dispense with that orientation, you may suddenly find yourself presented with material that you consider unsavory. You cannot deny the reality of the psyche, or those natural feelings that you experience in the flesh. When you begin to alter your perception, then, and your habitual picture of reality drops away, you may well find yourself encountering in distorted fashion elements of your own reality that you have up to then studiously denied or ignored.

This can show you what was missing from your home station if you know how to read the clues. You form your home station according to your beliefs. If you firmly believe, again, that sex is wrong, then your home station may involve you in a life “programming” in which you constantly try to deny the vitality of the flesh. The sight of a nude body might upset you. You might undress in the dark, or think, if you are married, of the sexual act of intercourse as dirty. If you are a man, you might be ashamed of what you consider to be your need.

I have an example in point. A young man I will call Joe wrote Ruburt a letter. He left his home in San Francisco to travel to India to study with a guru. He has been told that sexual desire mitigates against spiritual illumination. His home program involves him with no sex whatsoever. Joe tries desperately to abstain. At the same time, when he meditates and alters his consciousness, he immediately finds himself with a blinding headache, images of nude women, and fantasies of female goddesses out to tempt him from his celibate state.

Joe thinks of such images as very wrong. Instead, they are telling him something — that his home program is impoverished, for he has been denying the reality of his being.³ If he ignores the advice of his psyche, then his journeys into the unknown reality will be highly distorted. Seductive goddesses will follow him wherever he goes.