“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A few nights following Miss Cunningham’s hospitalization, we went to visit her. We had never been inside the hospital before. As we went inside, I stopped dead. There in front of me was the lobby I had seen in my July dream — complete with the glassed-in gift area. I told Rob on our way to Miss Cunningham’s room.

This time we both stopped in dismay. There sat Miss Cunningham, tied in bed, her eyes wild, her hair tangled. She was incapable of any communication. As I stood there, suddenly I “heard” Seth tell me, mentally, that my dream had forseen her condition which would lead to her death.

I wasn’t about to close off the Seth material until I made up my mind, though. Another possibility was always in the back of my thoughts. Suppose I stopped having the sessions while I tried to figure things out, then decided that Seth was right on all counts — and found I just couldn’t have sessions again? That, to me, would be the worst possibility of all — that I might close off knowledge out of uncertainity. So I kept on.

Then strange dull sounds; commotion. Startled, I went to the window, hardly able to believe my eyes. The police were shooting down the starlings that always nested in the treetops. Real fury rushed through me. My eyes brimmed over with tears. I stood at the window and dashed out this poem — far too emotionally unrestrained to be aesthetically a good one but an excellent example of my feelings at the time.

Unknowingly, in my poetry I had barely begun to form some concepts that would help me. Just before the sessions began the idea of “The Idiot” came to me as a symbol of inner truth that appears to be complete nonsense to the reasoning mind at times; or at best, highly impractical in normal living. I’d written two poems on the idea, and the day after the starlings were killed, I did another:

I’d identified all life with the birds, of course. Miss Cunningham, Rob, me and all the people that we knew were surely getting shot down; falling through time, we were dying in a descent that we couldn’t understand or control. Either that, or Seth and the material — still so strange to me — were giving answers that I refused, so far, to accept in practical terms.

And while I persisted in my uncertainity, Seth continued to explain the nature of the interior universe, giving clues and hints that I would eventually follow, laying down the framework that would allow me to deal with precisely those questions that concerned me.

If you will use psychological time as I have told you, you will get immediate first-hand experience with many facets of reality which take me pages to explain with the use of words. All entities are self-aware portions of the energy of All That Is. They are self-generating, and if you understand this, you will stop thinking in terms of beginnings and endings.

“Mrs. Butts, Mrs. Butts,” she’d call, and when I answered my door, she’d say, “Come, see. Look.” And she’d rush ahead of me down the hall, so agitated that she’d shake all over. “Here’s one of those letters. Oh, where is it? It was here. Oh, I know I saved it.”

During this period I was trying the psychological time exercises suggested by Seth, and often, just when I got started, Miss Cunningham would interrupt me. One day I went into the bedroom where it was quiet, closed my eyes, lay down and began clearing my mind of thoughts for my psy-time exercise. Several times Miss Cunningham came to mind: I wanted to ask her doctor about her condition but hesitated because I wasn’t a member of her family.

Suddenly I felt a strong jolt at the top of my skull; the next instant, I found myself standing on the front steps of an ordinary house. The bedroom was gone. Utterly bewildered, I looked about me, somehow “knowing” that I was still in Elmira. The neighborhood was middle-class, the house gray-framed, two-storied, with a front porch.

I blinked my eyes. Did I have amnesia? Had I actually walked here under my own power and forgotten? It didn’t occur to me then that I was having an out-of-body experience. For one thing, Seth had only mentioned them briefly; and for another, everything was so real that I took it for granted that I was in my body and as physical as anything else was.

He looked right through me, taking no notice of me at all. Since we were acquaintances, I was indignant. “Sam,” I said again, but he walked briskly past. I looked at him fully in the face, running ahead of him, ready to confront him with “What’s the matter with you?” But, instead, I realized that he didn’t see me. He never saw me at all.