“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.

“This thing will never work,” I said.
“We must be out of our minds,”
But we weren’t, at least not yet.
The cat smiled but didn’t say anything.

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.

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.