“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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:

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.

One of the most fascinating was an experiment we tried alone one night. I’m including Rob’s notes of it to give you an idea of the various things we were trying. I’m convinced that this sort of exercise is most valuable in that it helped to shake our consciousness out of its usual focus in objective, ego-oriented reality.

“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.”

“It was a craft,” I said. “Something Sarah’s father bartered for the shoes… something to do with fishing nets. The village was right by the sea. The cobbler’s shop was the only one around, though there were other villages. Sarah’s father made fishnets out of seaweed, dried seaweed. They wove it together like rope, then made the nets.

“The cobbler was comparatively well off, though not wealthy. He was fifty-three when he died. The boy, Albert, was too young to take over the shop, and for a couple of years the village had no cobbler, and the boy was a fisherman. Then another cobbler came and Albert helped out in the shop again … He finally married. His wife’s name was also Sarah. She was a cousin of Sarah Wellington’s. Most of the people in the village were related in one way or another; they had no other place to go.”

“They … they made bullets and put powder into them. The powder and bullets were kept separate until they were put into the gun, though one or two bullets were always kept ready. They saved the bullets if they could find them, after firing. The metal was hard to get. The guns were awfully heavy. These bullets were something new. They didn’t last; they stopped making them. For some reason I don’t understand, the bullets might explode. The men didn’t want to keep the powder and bullets together. Sometimes the powder was rusty and sometimes whitish. They were big bullets — one of the reasons the guns were so large.

“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.

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. …”