“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.

“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.

Then my visitor sat with my husband,
And smiled out through my eyes at the cat.
With me out of the way, he seemed quite at home.
“Good evening. I’m Seth,” my lips spoke.
He began walking my body about
As if getting accustomed to arms and legs.
I’d never been so astonished,
To be locked out of myself like that.

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.

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.

“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:

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 …

“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.)

“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.”

“If you were doing this instead of me,” I said, “you’d be cautious too.”

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.

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.

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

“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.

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.

“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?

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“I wonder if my town was real. To me it was …”