“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.

Suddenly, however, I entered a period of intense creative activity, ending a dry spell that had lasted for nearly a year. Ideas for poetry, in particular, came so quickly that I hardly had time to write them down. It wasn’t too difficult to trace most of these to the “Idea Construction” manuscript. Also, I began a new book.

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.

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.

It was the first time Miss Cunningham and I had really talked together in some time, and I was shocked by the change in her. Her hair was unkept. She plucked nervously at her dress. As she spoke, she would suddenly stop in the middle of a sentence, begin to hum a tune and then would forget what she had said. The next moment, she would be herself again. Then the cycle began all over.

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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:

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.

“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. …”

“That was something!” I said. “Did I somehow go back in space and time, or did I hallucinate the entire episode?”

“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.”