A Practical Daily Guide to Exploring Consciousness

I’ve spent a great deal of time studying the Seth material of Jane Roberts, the Monroe Institute Gateway material, and other ideas concerning consciousness and the nature of reality.

One thing that interests me most is moving beyond simply believing that consciousness is greater than the physical body and learning to experience that idea directly.

Seth gave many exercises designed to help turn philosophical concepts into personal experience. The practices below are my simplified and paraphrased versions of several of those ideas.

This is not meant to be a substitute for the original Seth books. It is a personal practice guide that I can return to regularly.

The goal is simple:

Don’t just think about consciousness. Explore it.

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1. Psychological Time — Psy-Time

Purpose:
To temporarily loosen your normal focus on physical time and sensory reality and become receptive to inner perception.

Time: 10–20 minutes.

Practice

Sit or lie comfortably.

Close your eyes.

Let your breathing become natural. Don’t deliberately try to enter a trance.

Gradually stop paying attention to:

– the clock
– your surroundings
– physical sounds
– worries about what you should be experiencing

Turn your attention inward.

Do not try to manufacture anything.

Simply observe whatever arises:

– images
– colors
– sensations
– memories
– thoughts
– voices or sounds
– feelings of movement
– changes in your perception of your body
– changes in your perception of time

If nothing happens, that is fine.

The exercise is not about forcing an experience. It is about learning to recognize kinds of perception that are normally drowned out by physical attention.

When finished, write down anything you noticed.

Important

Don’t immediately decide that an image was meaningful or meaningless. Record it first.

Over time, look for patterns.

Seth source: Psychological Time material in the Early Sessions and Dreams and Projections of Consciousness.

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2. Experience Your Own Feeling-Tone

Purpose:
To experience yourself underneath your ordinary identity, labels and beliefs.

This is one of the exercises from The Nature of Personal Reality that I find especially important.

Practice

Sit quietly and close your eyes.

For a few minutes, temporarily put aside descriptions such as:

– my name
– my age
– my occupation
– my physical appearance
– my accomplishments
– my problems
– my personality

Don’t ask:

“What am I supposed to feel?”

Instead ask inwardly:

What does simply being me feel like?

Don’t answer intellectually.

Feel.

There may be:

– warmth
– expansion
– energy
– calm
– vibration
– emotion
– movement
– nothing easily describable

Let that underlying feeling become more noticeable.

This is the feeling-tone of your being.

Stay with it for several minutes.

Eventually try sensing that feeling extending beyond the physical boundaries of your body.

Key idea

For a few moments, experience yourself before defining yourself.

Seth source: The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 614.

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3. Turn Down the Outer Senses

Purpose:
To begin recognizing what Seth called the Inner Senses.

Practice

Close your eyes.

Imagine that the physical room around you has gone completely dark.

For several moments, stop trying to hear ordinary sounds.

Instead, become receptive to an imagined inner hearing.

Then become receptive to an inner seeing.

Do not strain.

Allow:

– spontaneous images
– faces
– landscapes
– colors
– symbols
– fragments of scenes
– internal sounds

to arise naturally.

Treat them as experiences rather than immediately dismissing them as imagination.

The purpose is not to prove that they come from somewhere supernatural.

The purpose is to become aware of how much experience exists when ordinary sensory attention is reduced.

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4. Inner Touch — Sense an Object Beyond Sight

Purpose:
To experiment with Seth’s idea of an inner vibrational sense.

Practice

Choose an object in the room.

Look at it carefully.

Then close your eyes.

Imagine moving your awareness around the object.

Try to sense:

– its front
– its sides
– its back
– its shape
– the space surrounding it

Do not merely try to create a photograph in your mind.

Try to feel the existence of the object.

After practicing with objects, try something larger.

Imagine yourself outside near a tree.

Instead of merely seeing the tree, try to sense what it would be like to experience the tree’s existence from within.

You are not pretending that you have literally become the tree.

You are experimenting with loosening the boundary between observer and observed.

Seth source: First Inner Sense exercises discussed in the early material and Dreams and Projections of Consciousness.

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5. Observe Your Beliefs

Purpose:
To discover beliefs that may be operating automatically.

Seth repeatedly emphasizes that many things we call “facts” about ourselves may actually be beliefs we have stopped questioning.

Practice

During the day, notice sentences beginning with:

I am…

I can’t…

I always…

People always…

My body is…

Money is…

Relationships are…

Getting older means…

Write them down.

Do not initially try to change them.

Just ask:

Is this an objective fact, or is this something I have come to believe?

Examples:

“I have always been bad at this.”

“My body takes forever to recover.”

“People don’t change.”

“I have to work constantly to succeed.”

The purpose is to expose beliefs that have become invisible because you automatically accept them.

Seth source: The Nature of Personal Reality, Sessions 614–619.

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6. Substitute the Opposite Belief

Purpose:
To deliberately interrupt a limiting belief.

Choose one belief from Exercise 5.

Example:

Old belief:
“I’m becoming less capable as I get older.”

Now construct its constructive opposite.

New possibility:
“I continue discovering abilities and capacities that I have not yet explored.”

Do not simply repeat the new sentence.

Use three things together:

Thought

Think the new idea.

Emotion

Imagine how you would feel if it were already natural to you.

Imagination

Picture yourself behaving as someone for whom that idea is normal.

Practice for approximately five minutes.

Then stop.

Do not spend the rest of the day checking whether it “worked.”

Seth source: The Nature of Personal Reality, particularly the exercises concerning replacing a belief with its opposite.

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7. The Present Point of Power

Purpose:
To stop psychologically living in yesterday or worrying about tomorrow.

Whatever happened five years ago happened then.

But your present reaction to it is occurring now.

Whatever you fear about tomorrow is also being imagined now.

Therefore the only place from which you can change direction is the present.

Practice

Stop for a moment.

Notice:

What am I thinking right now?

What am I feeling right now?

What am I expecting right now?

Then ask:

If I could choose the direction of this moment, what would I choose instead?

Picture the preferred direction briefly.

Feel it.

Then return to your day.

You don’t need to solve your entire life.

Change the psychological direction of this moment.

Seth source: The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 669 and the material concerning the Present Point of Power.

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8. The Imagination Experiment

Purpose:
To use imagination as a creative tool rather than as a machine for rehearsing problems.

Pick one area of your life.

For several minutes imagine the best reasonable outcome.

Do not concern yourself with how it happens.

Experience the completed situation.

What are you seeing?

What are you doing?

How do you feel?

What has changed?

Make it playful.

Then end the exercise.

The important part

Do not immediately look around and say:

“Well, nothing changed.”

That defeats the exercise.

The purpose is first to break the mental pattern in which you repeatedly imagine only the problem.

Seth emphasized using imagination playfully rather than grimly forcing results.

Seth source: The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 669.

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9. Change Your Relationship With the Past

Purpose:
To remove some of the present emotional power of an old event.

Choose an event from your past that you still replay.

Remember what happened.

Then notice something important:

The physical event is no longer happening.

What exists now is your present memory, interpretation and emotional response to it.

Now imagine the event differently.

You might imagine:

– responding differently
– understanding something you did not understand then
– refusing to accept an old judgment about yourself
– experiencing a different emotional ending

Allow the revised scene to become vivid.

The purpose isn’t to deny historical facts.

The purpose is to discover how much of the past continues to exist because we recreate it psychologically in the present.

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10. Ask the Dreaming Self a Question

Purpose:
To use dreaming consciousness for problem solving and self-exploration.

Before going to sleep, choose one question.

Keep it simple.

For example:

What am I overlooking about this situation?

or

Show me something useful concerning this problem.

Then stop consciously analyzing it.

Go to sleep.

When you awaken, remain still for several seconds.

Ask:

What was I just experiencing?

Record:

– dreams
– fragments
– people
– locations
– emotions
– phrases
– unusual impressions

Don’t demand a literal answer.

A response may appear symbolically or may become apparent later during the day.

Seth source: Dream material throughout The Nature of Personal Reality and other Seth books.

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11. Expand the Dream

This practice is particularly interesting for lucid dreaming.

If you become aware that you are dreaming, do not immediately try to control everything.

Instead, explore.

If you’re inside a room:

Open a door.

If you’re walking down a street:

Continue farther than the dream originally seemed to contain.

Turn a corner.

Enter another building.

Ask to see what lies beyond the current scene.

The experiment is simple:

Does the dream environment continue creating itself as your attention moves into it?

This can turn dreaming into an actual laboratory for investigating consciousness.

Seth source: exercises concerning expanding inner space and dream reality.

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12. The Ocean of Consciousness Exercise

This is one of the exercises I find particularly compatible with the Monroe Gateway work.

It comes from an early Seth session concerning preparation for projection experiences.

Practice

Do this when relaxed before sleep.

Imagine that your mental energy or consciousness is like an enormous ocean.

Imagine yourself standing or walking upon its surface.

Don’t concentrate on your physical body.

Become aware of the vastness surrounding you.

Now use what you might call:

the inner eye

and

the inner ear.

In the distance, allow a figure to appear.

Do not chase it.

Do not decide beforehand who or what it is.

Allow the figure to approach.

Remain calm.

Let it communicate first.

Observe what happens without forcing an outcome.

When finished, write down what you experienced.

Why I find this important

The exercise combines:

– altered body awareness
– visualization
– inner perception
– communication
– emotional control
– preparation for projection

That makes it especially interesting alongside Gateway practice.

In the original material, Seth recommended becoming thoroughly comfortable with this exercise through repeated practice before moving into more demanding projection experiments.

Seth source: Early Sessions, Session 454.

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My Daily Seth + Gateway Practice

I don’t believe I need to perform every exercise every day.

Consistency is more important than quantity.

Morning — 10 to 20 minutes

Psychological Time

Simply observe inner experience without forcing anything.

Then write down anything unusual.

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During the Day — 2 to 5 minutes

Choose one:

– observe a belief
– substitute an opposite belief
– use the Present Point of Power
– briefly experience your feeling-tone
– perform the imagination experiment

The purpose is to bring consciousness work into ordinary waking life rather than separating “spiritual practice” from everyday life.

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Gateway Sessions

When doing a Gateway exercise, I want to pay particular attention to:

– changes in body awareness
– feelings of expansion
– vibrations
– spontaneous imagery
– changes in perceived location
– changes in time
– the feeling of having awareness independent of the physical body

I do not need to force any of these.

I simply notice them.

—

Before Sleep

Rotate between:

Dream Question

and

Ocean of Consciousness Exercise

Keep something nearby to record experiences immediately after waking.

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Weekly Rotation

Monday: Feeling-Tone
Tuesday: Inner Senses
Wednesday: Belief Work
Thursday: Imagination / Present Point of Power
Friday: Inner Touch
Saturday: Dream or Projection Practice
Sunday: Free practice — whichever exercise seems most useful

Psychological Time can remain the basic practice throughout the week.

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The Most Important Rule

Do not chase extraordinary experiences.

If I constantly ask:

“Did I leave my body?”

“Was that psychic?”

“Was that real?”

I return immediately to intellectual analysis.

Instead:

Experience first. Record second. Interpret later.

Over weeks and months I can look for recurring patterns that would be difficult to notice from one isolated experience.

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My Purpose

My objective isn’t to escape physical reality.

It is to understand consciousness more completely.

I already intellectually understand the proposition that consciousness may be greater than the physical personality.

The next step is experiential.

Seth’s exercises, the Gateway material, meditation, dreams and my own observations are different ways of investigating the same fundamental question:

What am I when my attention is no longer completely focused upon the physical world?

That is the experiment.