“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.

“You’re moving it,” I shouted.
“Hon, that isn’t fair.”
“What a riot.” I tried to laugh.
“I’m not doing it,” Rob said.

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.

“What were we saying? Did you want something? How nice to see you,” she said brightly. But already, the opaqueness was ready to settle back, so I knew it was useless. Disquieted, I returned to my apartment.

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 hope you see what I have done here. I have initiated the idea of motion, for true transparency is not the ability to see through but to move through. This is what I mean by fifth dimension. Now remove the structure of the wires and cubes. Things behave as if the wires and cubes were there, but these are only constructions necessary, even to those on my plane, in order to make this comprehensible to our faculties, the faculties of any entity.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Another pause. “What?” Rob said. “Can you make that clearer?”

“What crops did they grow?” he asked, and I tried to rouse myself enough to keep on speaking while still retaining focus on these strange shifting scenes.

“What do you see now?” Rob asked.

“In the inn there was a huge fireplace. Their dishes were made of earthenware. They had ale … it was served with meals. Their meat was ribs — mutton ribs — and something called ‘braunsweiger.’ They had bread … barley bread and soup … fish soup and mussels. They didn’t have salt. They had beans; I don’t know what kind.

“They always carried pistols. The pistols were black and long, much longer than pistols today. There was a jigger at the top that they kept powder in — I don’t know what for.”

“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.

“There were invasions. A lot of them came along that coast earlier, the Norsemen and, I guess, the Gauls. The Gauls looked French, swarthy; and they were little men. Everyone knows what the Norsemen looked like. …”

I was quiet again. Rob didn’t know exactly what to do, so he just asked the first question that came into his head. “Were the people happy?”

“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?

“What did it feel like? What do you think about it?”

“Well, what did you see?”

“What was his face like?” I asked.

“We will. Don’t worry about that. In the meantime, it is what it is,” Rob said.

“Yeah … but is it what it is, like Willie our cat is?”