“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

During the rest of that September in 1963, I reread the “Idea Construction” manuscript many times, trying to understand it and hoping to recapture some of the feelings I had had during its delivery. Now and then, flashing insights came to me in response, but more often than not, I just sat there, frustrated. My intellect just could not get beyond certain points, and I knew it.

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.

“This thing will never work,” I said.
“We must be out of our minds,”
But we weren’t, at least not yet.
The cat smiled but didn’t say anything.

“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.

But my mind felt crowded out of itself,
By thoughts not its own,
As if someone were settling down in my skull
That I hadn’t invited in.

But he was benign and jovial as a bishop
Someone might ask in for an evening of tea,
And when he let me peek out through his eyes,
The familiar living room seemed very strange.

Now as seasons come and go,
He visits twice a week,
From worlds that have no wind or snow,
But still have promises to keep.

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.

“What were we saying? Did you want something? How nice to see you,” she said brightly. But already, the opaqueness was ready to settle back, so I knew it was useless. Disquieted, I returned to my apartment.

As the days passed, I was nervously aware of her, wandering through the hallways, and made it a point to look in on her now and then. But we were so taken up with our own affairs that I saw her infrequently.

“Sure … glad to,” I said. “And reincarnation is a terrific theory to play around with. Remember my first published short story, “Red Wagon,” in Fantasy and Science Fiction? It was based on reincarnation. But that doesn’t mean that I believe in it, or think it’s true or fact.”

“Oh, Hon,” I retorted, with uneasy and quite unconscious scorn. So the early sessions intrigued me, but, intellectually, I couldn’t accept reincarnation. Interestingly enough, reincarnation wasn’t a part of the “Idea Construction” experience. Those ideas were imbedded in me so thoroughly that I would never doubt them.

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:

As far as fifth dimension is concerned, I have said that it is space. I will have to try to build up the image of a structure to help you understand, but then I must rip down the structure because there is none there.

Not only are we on different sides of the same wires, but we are at the same time either above or below, according to your viewpoint. And if you consider the wires as forming cubes … then the cubes could also fit one within the other, without disturbing the inhabitants of either cube one iota — and these cubes are also within cubes, which are themselves within cubes, and I am speaking now only of the small particle of space taken up by your plane and mine.

Again, now think in terms of your plane, bounded by its small spindly set of wires, and my plane on the other side. These, as I have said, have also boundless solidarity and depth, yet in usual terms, to one side the other is transparent. You cannot see through, but the two planes move through each other constantly.

I hope you see what I have done here. I have initiated the idea of motion, for true transparency is not the ability to see through but to move through. This is what I mean by fifth dimension. Now remove the structure of the wires and cubes. Things behave as if the wires and cubes were there, but these are only constructions necessary, even to those on my plane, in order to make this comprehensible to our faculties, the faculties of any entity.

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 …

Again, if you will consider our maze of wires, I will ask you to imagine them filling up everything that is, with your plane and my plane like two small birds nests in the netlike fabric of some gigantic tree … Consider, for example, that these wires are also mobile, constantly trembling and also alive, in that they not only carry the stuff of the universe but are themselves projections of this stuff, and you will see how difficult it is to explain. Nor can I blame you for growing tired when after asking you to imagine this strange structure, I then insist that you tear it apart, for it is no more actually seen or touched than is the buzzing of a million invisible bees.

“It makes more sense to me than anything I’ve ever read,” I said. “But where did it come from? Now, in my ordinary state of consciousness, I can only appreciate it or even criticize it. The source is gone.”

When he said things like that, I’d get upset, and the familiar living room seemed strange. The table, chairs, the couch and rug looked satisfyingly normal in the warm lamplight. Yet I felt these shapes were highly significant, only intrusions of other realities that were invisible but always active.

But Rob only grinned. “Would I?”

For me, the episode was amazingly vivid, the scenes clear and bright in my mind’s eye. It was something like attending an inner movie. (Or, someone might say, like dreaming vividly while awake.) But, for me, then, it was simply a completely new state of consciousness and awareness, a psychological experience like none I’d known before.

“There were windows in the front room, though, and benches and a stone floor. It was a stone house with a fireplace; September, damp and foggy in the afternoon, about four o’clock. Sarah Wellington was blond. She had stringy hair. She wasn’t very pretty, but bony. She was seventeen.

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.

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 see tomatoes, but even as I say it, it seems to me once that I read that people didn’t eat tomatoes in those days. But yes, the people in the small villages did; and wheat and barley. They had cows.

I laughed out loud, because I saw it so clearly. “I see houses and a couple of shops, then a narrow cobbled walk raised up high — it was a partly dirt road built up of rocks and stones that ran around an inlet from the sea. But it was never flooded; the road kept the village dry. There wasn’t any sandy beach, though.”

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

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.

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.

“Albert liked to hunt, but he couldn’t get much because the ground was too rocky … deer and rabbits, a special kind of rabbit, no big tails, gray hares of some kind. And there were gray squirrels.”

Then suddenly, I was back again, seeing the later time. “In London, I don’t know why, Albert’s wife liked to go to the bakery shops. They had fancier breads there than in the village. And Sarah … the first one … if she hadn’t burned to death, she would have died anyhow at seventeen, of tuberculosis. One lung was bad. It was a bad place to live. The village wasn’t sunny, and they kept the windows closed. There weren’t many windows anyway. The land was so rocky … and they would build a house on a slab of rock, and it was always damp. … Sarah’s dress was dirty. It was woolen, a brown natural color because it wasn’t dyed. It wouldn’t have burned so, but it had grease on it, and the grease caught the flames. …”

I shivered, seeing the dress catch fire and watching once again as the cobbler rolled the girl out to the street, beating at the flames. Then I seemed to be above the town again, looking down, but dimly. “The descendants of the invaders lived in the village too. There was the Laverne family, and De Nauge, and the Breims. They slept on hay. It was so damp and foggy, and the hay was never dry …”

“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?

“A few could write their names, but usually they couldn’t read other people’s names. … They didn’t have water to drink. There was salt in the ocean — that’s why they washed there. But they thought that drinking water was unhealthy. It was hilly and rocky behind the village, but there was a stream up there, and they went up with horses and buckets. But they didn’t drink the water. They drank ale. They made soups from the water, though, and they were lucky that the stream came down from a high place. Otherwise they’d have had to dig down too far.

“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.”

“My experience was great,” I said. “But it was something like a moving picture I was looking at from some crazy angle. The scenes would change too. I’d be looking at that main street, and then suddenly I’d be in the hills beyond the village. Not really there like I’m in this room now … but … partially floating. Very dim at times. But your vision was quicker, more limited, but very precise.”

“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.”

“Yeah … but is it what it is, like Willie our cat is?”