“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth did mention Rob’s vision in the next (thirteenth) session on January 6, 1964. We began this one with the Ouija board. Rob said, aloud: “Seth, can you tell me anything about the vision I had two nights ago?”

“In what land was this?” Rob asked.

“Was I alive then?” Rob asked.

“Will you tell us what mental enzymes are? You mentioned them once before in a past session. I guess I’d rather learn more about that right now,” Rob said.

Rob laughed at the remark about my subconscious, but instead of giving us our rest period, Seth went on for a moment:

Here, we took our break. Rob always enjoyed Seth’s sense of humor, and he was still smiling at the last remark when I came out of trance. “He called me Joseph again,” he said.

“Serves you right,” I said, grinning. Seth referred to me as Ruburt and to Rob as Joseph, saying that these were our entity names. The entity is the whole self who experiences many reincarnations. I didn’t like either name too well, so we used to joke about them. We didn’t have time to say much, however, because Seth came back in about ten minutes. During the break, Rob had made a remark about solidified emotion, and Seth began by saying:

The sessions had begun on December 2,1963. This was still only the middle of January of 1964. We were trying other experiments on our own, some like the example given earlier, some entirely different. Mornings, I worked on my book. Afternoons were spent at the gallery. If it wasn’t a session night, after dinner and an hour’s poetry, we tried other experiments. Rob spent a good deal of time typing the sessions, as he still does. He couldn’t do much more without cutting down on his own painting hours, so I often did experiments on my own while he was in the studio.

Because we were so innocent about psychic literature, we weren’t hampered by superstitious fears about such phenomena. I didn’t believe in gods or demons, so I didn’t fear them. I wanted to learn. Rob and I had discovered a whole new world together, and we were going to explore it.

One night while Rob was busy in the studio, I decided to experiment with a crystal ball. Since I didn’t have one, I substituted a lovely blue bottle which was filled with water and into which I stared intently for a good half hour. Just as I finished, Rob came out to see what I was up to. According to him, I had been too quiet.

After staring into the bottle, I began talking with Rob in the living room. I mentioned being able to put myself in a dissociated state at the gallery when things got sticky and said that this saved lots of effort on my part. As I spoke, my voice seemed to get hoarse and husky. I laughed and commented that I hoped Seth wasn’t going to start using my voice whenever he wanted to.

Rob asked me what was wrong. I answered that I felt odd and unlike myself. My body then was very light — weightless to me, anyway. I wasn’t conscious of any muscular weight or pressure at all. My arms and shoulders felt like water or air. Rob told me to get up. He was beginning to look worried. But I could hardly rise from the chair. He had to help me to the couch. I didn’t feel physical enough to move.

Rob made coffee for me. I didn’t believe I could lift the cup. When I finally did, my motions were extremely slow, as in a slow-motion motion picture. Rob made me drink two cups of coffee. He had me stand with my head out of the kitchen window in the cold night air, but nothing seemed to help. I just seemed to be in a weightless body in which I had little interest. By now I was rather frightened, yet I thought that I could snap out of it if I really exerted all of my will power — or knew how.

Rob thought the concentration of writing a statement of how I felt would help. Instead, my efforts showed what a crazy state I was in. My handwriting just wasn’t my own. Hardly any pressure was exerted on the pen. The writing was wavery, small and grew progressively smaller. The prose expression was nothing like mine; it was very childish. Thoughts or messages poured to mind, and I wrote them down in this weird (unedited) script:

I do feel strange though, no doubt about it. Rob says I’m just wiggling my fingers.

My senses were still very acute — vision … and hearing. We decided that since I wasn’t having much luck coming out of the trance, we might as well use it to do some experiments. Besides the handwriting, I tried the typewriter. This frightened me a bit further, since I couldn’t exert enough pressure to use the keys. All this time I felt completely weightless, unable to function in the physical world. Because my motions were so strange, Rob had the impression that my limbs were heavy. To me they were as light as air. I felt completely relaxed and still my senses were sharp and clear as never before. I was able to talk to Rob without difficulty, also. When Rob felt my hand, it was wet and floppy, and my body seemed to have no physical resistance at all.

Rob asked me to read the small print on the inside of a match cover and a few lines from a book — all held out much farther than I could usually read — and I was able to do this quickly and without effort. My sight was much better than it is normally.

While experimenting, we found that I could make a rapid decisive motion if I exerted great mental force. Rob asked me to lift a coffee cup with a normal gesture. (Earlier, he had held the cup while I sipped the coffee.) I concentrated as hard as I could on what he wanted me to do — which seemed hilarious to me, and an impossible task — and then really made a supreme physical effort. As a result, my hand jerked up high, suddenly, and then just as suddenly swung back, banging the cup back on the counter.

Applied suggestion by Rob would have snapped me out of this state easily, but we didn’t know that at the time. As it was, the condition lasted about three hours, ending only when we went to bed, past midnight. By then I was no longer frightened but merely curious and trying with one part of my consciousness to find out what the other part was up to — and how it went about its business. Finally, I fell asleep, expecting nothing but exhausted slumber for the rest of the night.

As they vanished, I felt the strangest sense of loss. I ‘knew’ that the men were as real as I was, and that I had glimpsed some other dimension of reality quite as valid as the one I knew. Through all of this, I hadn’t thought to disturb Rob, who was sleeping soundly beside me. My attention was utterly focused on the events. Now, turning toward him, I remembered the noise that had awakened me. Hadn’t it awakened him? Had there ever been a noise?