“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It was the first time Miss Cunningham and I had really talked together in some time, and I was shocked by the change in her. Her hair was unkept. She plucked nervously at her dress. As she spoke, she would suddenly stop in the middle of a sentence, begin to hum a tune and then would forget what she had said. The next moment, she would be herself again. Then the cycle began all over.

I had only begun speaking for Seth a few sessions earlier. Before the eighth session, all replies came through the board. The whole thing seemed so wild to me. “Just turning into someone else like that!” I used to say. The session was held on the evening of January 2, 1964 and lasted three hours. We locked the door and closed the blinds but always left the lights on for the sessions. We began this one with the Ouija board, but after only a few moments, I shoved it aside and began dictating as Seth. Here is a brief excerpt from that twelfth session:

We merely construct imaginary lines to walk upon. So real are the wall constructions of your room that you would freeze in the winter time without them, yet there is no room and no walls. So, in a like manner, the wires that we constructed are real to us in the universe, although … to me, the walls are transparent. So are the wires that we constructed to make our point about the fifth dimension, but for all practical purposes, we must behave as if the wires were there …

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.

I paused again. Then I saw the whole thing very clearly, and I said, excited: “She died, at seventeen, there in the cobbler’s shop. She died from burns. The cobbler came out of the back room, and there she was, all in flames and screaming. He shoved her out into the street and rolled her over and over on the stones and in the dirt; but she died.

“The fishermen had plain wooden boats and piles of fish on a good day. Black fish, some of them only a few inches long, some much longer, averaging maybe a foot in length. There was fishing all year long. It wasn’t seasonal. The water was warm in the winter. That’s why it was so foggy. They didn’t farm too much because the ground was poor and rocky, very hilly; so they depended on fish.”

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.

Suddenly I started laughing. I was seeing this pistol very clearly. But I have absolutely no interest in guns and no knowledge of them at all, so it was difficult to explain how the pistol was made. I didn’t know the names of the parts. It seemed incongruous that I could have a “vision” of such a simple object and then not have the vocabulary to describe it.

“The people didn’t go to London often. Some never went at all. The first Sarah, who died at seventeen, never went. Albert’s Sarah went. King Edward was in London then. Albert and Sarah did well and could afford to go. When Edward was crowned, they made the trip. They didn’t see the coronation. She was forty-one and he was forty-six at the time. They had two or three children. I don’t know what happened to them.

“That’s a silly question,” I retorted, but with a great impartiality; it didn’t seem that it was me replying at all. “They were as happy as anyone else then. They didn’t like their babies dying, but they just thought that … that was life. They drank a lot. Most of them couldn’t read. Well, the sexton could some, not much. People didn’t think it was necessary. They didn’t have books, so what good did it do to learn to read?

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

“I don’t know,” I said. “I saw so much, so clearly. And I seemed to change position in the air or in space, though I knew I was here, in this room. Could I have seen an old movie when I was a child, forgotten it, and then hallucinated scenes from it, all without knowing?”