“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.

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.

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.

“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.

By now, we were also trying other experiments for my book, which I was writing during the mornings. And in our 12th Session Seth gave what I still think of as a cornerstone that served as a preliminary framework upon which the rest of The Seth Material would be built. I have quoted parts of it in other books, yet the analogy Seth gave us is such an excellent introduction to the interior universe and to his ideas that it is almost indispensable. Each time I read it, I gain new insights.

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:

I’m rather embarrassed now by the fact that we turned the lights off, since our sessions and classes are always conducted in normal light. In those days, though, we didn’t know how to proceed, and we had read that such affairs were conducted in near-darkness. Rob and I sat at my wooden table with only a small electric candle lit. After quite some time, I began to see pictures, and as Rob took notes, I spoke aloud in my own voice, describing what I was seeing and experiencing. This was the resulting monologue: