“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

The reason is rather apparent: If you know that a situation is ‘imaginary,’ you are not going to come to grips with it. This way, you have your actors taking the situation as it seems to be but looking about in amazement now and then to wonder how they got where they are, who constructed the sets and so forth. They do not realize that the whole thing is self-created, nor should they in the main, since the urgency to solve problems would dissolve.

“Would it help if we visited her?”

Actually we didn’t get up to see her for some time. In the thirty-third session, March 9, Seth told us that April 15 would be a critical date for Miss Cunningham, but that is all he said.

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.

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.

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.

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.