“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Because of the Miss Cunningham dream and the “Idea Construction” experience, Rob suggested that I try some experiments in ESP and expansion of consciousness and do a book on the results — negative or positive. Those of you who read my two other books in this field know that the experiments were astonishingly successful and led, through the Ouija board, to our first contact with Seth.

We tried the Ouija board one night,
My husband Rob and I.
The cat sat on the bright blue rug.
Hot coffee bubbled on the stove.

“You’re moving it,” I shouted.
“Hon, that isn’t fair.”
“What a riot.” I tried to laugh.
“I’m not doing it,” Rob said.

“You may call me Seth,” the letters spelled.
Rob looked up but didn’t speak.
The cat strolled about in the warm lamplight.
“The coffee must be done,” I cried.

I ran into the kitchen. “Do you want some now?”
Rob shook his head.
“There’s something that wants you back at the board.
You’d better sit down again.”

In the meantime, we held our board sessions twice a week. By the time I returned from the art gallery on those winter afternoons, it was already dark. After supper, I did the dishes and worked on my poetry for an hour, and then Rob got out the board. Often these sessions lasted until midnight. Rob took verbatim notes from the beginning. Most of the first ten sessions dealt with reincarnation and included some fascinating material on Rob’s family.

“I notice we’ve been using the insights about my parents and relating to them better than we ever did before,” Rob said.

“Maybe underneath you knew it was true even then,” Rob said.

“Let me read you some of the material you just dictated,” Rob said, and he read several pages. (Only a few excerpts were given here.)

“Is it?” Rob asked. “Or do you only permit it freedom — with great caution and under certain definite conditions?”

But Rob only grinned. “Would I?”

During all of this time, Rob and I were having our first experiences with mobility of consciousness. What else could consciousness do? What could mine do? The questions filled me with wonder, and we tried all kinds of experiments.

One of the most fascinating was an experiment we tried alone one night. I’m including Rob’s notes of it to give you an idea of the various things we were trying. I’m convinced that this sort of exercise is most valuable in that it helped to shake our consciousness out of its usual focus in objective, ego-oriented reality.

I’m rather embarrassed now by the fact that we turned the lights off, since our sessions and classes are always conducted in normal light. In those days, though, we didn’t know how to proceed, and we had read that such affairs were conducted in near-darkness. Rob and I sat at my wooden table with only a small electric candle lit. After quite some time, I began to see pictures, and as Rob took notes, I spoke aloud in my own voice, describing what I was seeing and experiencing. This was the resulting monologue:

I paused. Rob waited for a few moments, wondering whether or not to interrupt me. Finally, he asked quietly, “Where did she live?”

Another pause. “What?” Rob said. “Can you make that clearer?”

“Do you know the name of the village?” Rob asked.

I kept seeing more. I would think that I was telling Rob about each scene as I saw it, but then he would ask a question, and I’d realize that I hadn’t said a word for some time.

I stopped speaking again for a few minutes. I don’t know if my eyes were open or closed, and, in any case, the room was so dark that Rob could just manage to see in order to make notes. All I saw were the vivid places and people, and I spoke in jerky quick sentences, sometimes with no effort to make complete sentences.

“What do you see now?” Rob asked.

“Would you know it if you saw it in physical life now? If you took a trip to England?” Rob asked.

My inner gaze traveled up the hills beyond the village. I felt myself climbing. But Rob interrupted: “How far was it from London?”

Yet I seemed to know everything about the gun. Part of me was aware of the strangeness of the situation and of the flickering candlelight in which Rob was furiously taking notes. But another part of my consciousness was focused on the gun, and I was intent upon describing it as well as possible.

I was quiet again. Rob didn’t know exactly what to do, so he just asked the first question that came into his head. “Were the people happy?”

I stopped. Suddenly all of it was gone. I told Rob, and he switched the lights on.

“It’s certainly possible,” Rob said. “Even that would show the mind’s fantastic abilities. But I have something to tell you, too. Just before you got started, I had a vision of my own.”

Rob grinned. “I couldn’t see his head, shoulders, or even waist. The land was very flat — reds and browns. There was nothing in the far distance on the left, beyond the feet. For a moment, though, I thought I saw a group of pyramids far ahead on the horizon to the right. They were in cool brilliant color, blues or greens. I couldn’t see the bases of these, though, and I’m not even sure they were pyramids. But I saw the soles of the man’s feet, wrinkled and brown and, yes, without shoes, lifting after each stride. They were covered with dust.”

“I’m going to do a sketch or painting of it,” Rob said. “The colors were terrific.”

“I’ll ask Seth,” Rob said, smiling. “Or maybe he wasn’t anyone.”

“Then isn’t that enough for now?” Rob said. I nodded; at the very least there was enough material for a good short story on the whole thing, I thought. Yet the village and the scenes lingered in my memory. “We’ve only been involved in this stuff a little over a month,” I said. “I’m content for now. But we’re going to have to try and check some of this out if it keeps on.”

“We will. Don’t worry about that. In the meantime, it is what it is,” Rob said.

Rob began to laugh. “That’s part of the fun of it,” he said. “Finding out.”