“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

She did not remember him … as she taught his children. He admired her very much as his children, one in particular, found her an excellent teacher. Frank Withers considered her a friend, attaching more importance than she did to her influence upon his children. But beyond this, Miss Cunningham’s present personality has been gently disentangling itself from this plane of reality — and she simply did not remember him.

“Will she be … fully materialized on another plane before she dies in this one?” Rob asked. It was difficult for him to ask questions and take notes at the same time, but if possible, he wanted the questions answered before he forgot them.

So the first spring of the sessions came, a cold bright March. Miss Cunningham’s apartment door became a stimulus to my constant questions. Every time I passed it, I wondered again: Was she transferring her consciousness to another level of reality? Would she survive death when it came, in meaningful terms? And behind all these questions there was the big one: Was Seth really a personality who had survived death? And would I really ever know?

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.

I wrote four more poems of varying merit about that one event and behind the whole affair was defiant recognition of the value of any consciousness, whatever its form. And the deeper question: Why was it ever annihilated, at least in our terms? Why was life constructed to be destroyed? I knew, even then, that I had to find my own answers — that each of us does. And yet at that point, I felt duty-bound to question my own experiences, Seth and the sessions because I refused to hide in self-delusions.

One man bent to wash his hands in it
And saw
The skin peel off like dirt,
But the lawn was full
With the falling corpses of the birds,
And when he cried out, no one heard.

One night Rob asked Seth about it, and Seth said,

It’s one of my little tricks to add to Ruburt’s faltering and erratic confidence — and again, this is with his inner permission.

“Right in the middle of the month — April 15, I think it was,” she said, without hesitation. “The hospital refused to keep her for even one more day, and that night we had her transferred.”

“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.

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.

We had no idea then that I would be involved in still more startling episodes with Miss Cunningham, but I grinned, looking out the window. I’d been on my first real “field trip.” I didn’t have to take everything Seth said on faith alone. The psychological time exercises suddenly took on greater significance. I was ready now to really use the inner senses. And almost immediately after this, Seth began his discussions on the nature of dream reality and the methods that would let us explore it for ourselves. If I could leave my body and go out into the physical world, then I didn’t see why I couldn’t leave it and explore the inner one.