“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

It was a strange time. The assassination of JFK took place just after our sessions began. The familiar physical world did not seem to be a very secure place. The old ways of thought were bringing appalling fruits. An uneasy December followed — bitter and dreary and discouraging on the national scene — and locally the weather was dark, with snow piled high. And yet, inside our small, lighted living room, we both felt we were making important inroads, gaining invaluable insights and finding a point of sanity amid a chaotic world.

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.

“Her parents weren’t there, and Sarah didn’t live there either!”

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

“How long did she live?” he asked.

“She … she lived three doors down the street, in a dark front room. She had two brothers, one off someplace; he was a sailor. The other was younger. Sarah’s father did something for the cobbler, and, in return, he made shoes for the younger brother, and Sarah was in the shop to get them.”

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 …”