“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 used to any messages from Seth when I was out of the house, and I’d been in the habit of discouraging any when I wasn’t having a session. The whole affair was disturbing. I was glad to get back out in the spring night air. There was little need to stay, and again, it was a session night.

Our living room seemed twice as cozy that evening, with the warm lights and Willie sleeping on the rug. But I said to Rob, “Look, Miss Cunningham was as rational and bright as either of us not too long ago. What happened? How do we know it won’t happen to us?” And the comfortable room suddenly seemed a facade. In years to come, where would we be? What difference could it make that we ever sat in this room, or had sessions, or moved furniture, or stroked the cat? So I didn’t feel like going into a trance.

Ruburt wove a dream about a legitimate telepathic communication. The information was correct in its bare essentials. Any such inner communications are basically the same in that they are picked up by the inner senses, whether the information seems telepathic or clairvoyant in your terms.

At the precise time of Ruburt’s dream, Miss Cunningham was deciding to leave this plane of reality. Ruburt received the message directly. The unwillingness on Miss Cunningham’s part represented her present personality’s protest against the change that a deeper part of herself deemed necessary and proper.

It was Miss Cunningham’s discovery that she needed operations on both eyes that caused this deeper decision. When Ruburt learned about the projected operations, he leapt to the conclusion that this was the meaning of the dream. Subconsciously, however, he knew that far more was involved. Part of the subconscious fantasy in the dream was valid, representing a watered-down version of the actual communication — for example, Miss Cunningham’s dark apparel.

Miss Cunningham had been preparing herself for her own departure since she heard of the possible operations. Yet consciously, she was ignorant of her own inner decision.

All kinds of questions came into Rob’s mind. When Seth paused for a moment, he asked, “You said once that the shock of birth was worse than the shock of death. Why?”

“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?

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.

A few days after the last session, I sat in my small office at the art gallery, looking out at the landscaped yard. That afternoon it was difficult to keep my mind on my work. People were coming and going in the hallways. Had they lived before? Was their consciousness born anew, and was it really something quite independent of the images they wore?

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.

“Do unto others, I tell you.”
He wanted to say more
But they carted him off.
The good people laughed.
On the ground was a puddle
Of the idiot’s tears.

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.

Joseph was correct when he spoke of entities creating stages upon which to act out their problems. The point is that once the play begins, the actors are so completely engrossed in their roles that they forget that they themselves wrote the play, constructed the sets or are even acting.

Rob was all ready to ask, “Well, how come you’re letting us in on the secret?” But he never had a chance to ask the question.

Ruburt was upset, and with good reason. … It goes without saying that a bird’s death is inevitable, but a cat killing a bird does not have to juggle the same sort of values with which a man must be concerned. For now, suffice it to say that to kill for self-protection or food on your plane does not involve you in what we may call for the first time, I believe, karmic consequences.

During these springtime sessions, my voice began to deepen considerably. At times it was startlingly vibrant and powerful, with the masculine tones quite noticeable. Rob was convinced that it contained an additional energy, rather impossible for my own vocal chords — the resonance in particular.

On April 23, I met Miss Cunningham’s niece in the hall and asked about her condition. “Oh, didn’t you know?” she said. “We had to take her to a nursing home. She became so violent that the hospital called and told us we’d have to move her. She upset the whole floor, ran screaming up and down the halls, threw dishes at the nurses and was completely irrational.”

For a moment I didn’t know what to say. It was almost impossible to imagine Miss Cunningham indulging in such behavior. Then I remembered the date given by Seth, so I asked as casually as I could, “When did all this happen?”

“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.”

Miss Cunningham stayed in the nursing home for a short time when the family was notified again that she was unmanagable, and that other arrangements would have to be made. Once she ran out of the place in her nightgown, out into the busy street in the middle of evening traffic. Not wanting to commit her, the relatives returned her to the apartment, in care of a part-time housekeeper.

She stayed here several months, without ever showing any signs of violent behavior. But her mind deteriorated more and more. She thought she was getting threatening letters.

“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.”

She’d almost tear the apartment apart looking for the threatening letter that she was sure had come in the mail. She was so persuasive that the first two times this happened, I wondered if she was getting threatening mail, as unlikely as this seemed. I suggested that we open her mail together each day, but then she still insisted that the letters came — slid beneath the door — and, of course, she always misplaced them or lost them. So, for a while it was touch and go. I was very worried about her.

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.

Now I was really frightened. Was I a ghost? The warm sunlight was everywhere on the lawns, and the shadows were real. There was no doubt that this was the physical world. Then why didn’t I show up in it? Suddenly I remembered the jolt I’d felt at the base of my neck … had I had an attack of some sort? Maybe I was delirious? But I was thinking rationally.

In the meantime, the doctor got into his car and drove away. I stood there, yelling at him and wondering how I would get home. Then suddenly I thought: “Could I be out of my body?” But how, since I didn’t remember leaving it? Quickly I looked at the house. The street number wasn’t visible, and I was in the middle of the block, away from street signs. At that moment, I felt another sharp jolt at the back of my neck and instantly found myself back in my bedroom, fully alert and awake.

All kinds of thoughts flooded to my mind. Consciousness was independent of the body — Seth was right — and if that was true, then there was no reason why he couldn’t be what he said he was: an independent personality, out of the flesh. But why hadn’t I caught on sooner? And why hadn’t I run up to see if the house mailbox had a name on it? I couldn’t wait till Rob came home so I could tell him what happened.

He was envious. I was triumphant. This time, I didn’t have to wait for him to report what I’d done while I was in a Seth trance. I’d been myself. “And I know it wasn’t a hallucination,” I said. “I was completely alert, and the whole thing brings up so many questions … and ideas for experiments.”

“You should call Sam and ask him where he was when you saw him,” Rob said.

Yet, as badly as I wanted to check this out, I just couldn’t bring myself to call Dr. Levine. “He’ll think I was out of my mind instead of out of my body,” I said. “And what excuse could I use? If I knew what the street was, I could at least say, ‘I thought I saw you on such-and-such a street.’ “

“Well, I know I was out of my body. That’s what counts as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “In that ‘Idea Construction’ thing I didn’t seem to have a body — I seemed to just be my consciousness. So I never made any connection at first between the two experiences. …

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.