“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.

I have described those early sessions elsewhere, but here I’m including, instead, a poem that is a dramatic, intuitive statement about my feelings at the time. Actually, several episodes are condensed into one in the poem. Seth didn’t really announce himself until we had worked with the Ouija board four times. And it was in the middle of the eighth session that I began to speak for him. Almost from the beginning, however, I did anticipate what the board was going to “say,” and the poem is as valid as any strictly factual statement I could make about those sessions — if not more so.

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.

Then the little pointer moved,
As if a thousand molecules grew legs,
And carried it upon their backs,
Lightning-fast across the board.

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.”

Actually, the board first gave a few messages from a personality called Frank Withers, who insisted that he had known our neighbor, Miss Cunningham. I didn’t take this very seriously at first, but he also said that he knew an elderly woman who worked with me at the local art gallery where I had a part-time job. When questioned, this woman told me that she had known such a man, though he had merely been an acquaintance.

This was enough to send me to Miss Cunningham’s apartment, hoping to bring up the name in conversation. (I wasn’t about to tell anyone about the Ouija board messages.) It struck me odd, also, that Miss Cunningham would be in any way connected with our Ouija activities. This tie-in immediately reminded me of the July dream, of course.

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 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: