“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the next session the following night, Seth launched into the nature of my last trance experience and used it as a stepping stone for his first real discussion of the nature of human personality. As the session shows, Seth apparently decided that it was time to take me in hand. From here on, he would continue to comment on my trance experiments and teach me to regulate them.

Rob was intrigued not only by the material but by Seth himself as he began to manifest his own personality more clearly. My voice had been undergoing changes, becoming more similar to what we now call the Seth voice — deeper, lower, richer in tone than mine and more masculine. But on this particular night, Rob watched, amused, while Seth told him in no uncertain terms what he thought of my experiment — using my own lips to do it! (I’m also including Rob’s notes, as they apply.)

I’m not going into so-called weather on my plane tonight. I came in halfway on an interesting little experiment that Ruburt tried on his own, and you can thank me that he came out of it so well. Really, Ruburt, I’m surprised at you. In your past life [in Boston] you would have known better.

(With a laugh, Rob told me that as Seth, I’d been pacing up and down the room, giving “myself” the dickens about the trance experiment, then switching to the humorous comparison of his voice and mine. I still haven’t stopped smoking, incidentally. Back in those days, I wasn’t about to have a trance personality order me about, even for my own good. Now the habit still lingers, partially as a sign of my independence from Seth and partially as a sign of my dependence upon tobacco …

(We took a break here. Rob said that his fingers felt as if they were falling off. It was almost 10:00 P.M. and Seth had been speaking quite rapidly since the beginning of the session at nine o’clock. We started up again in ten minutes, and once more, my voice began to deepen.)

The cat focuses upon one thing at a time even though it has no strong ego. So Jane concentrates while I give her the messages, even though it is not the ego which is concentrating. You get a subconscious focus different in many ways from conscious concentration. In this state the attention is focused inward rather than outward, and it is the inner rather than the outer senses that are being exercised. The cat is doing the same thing, in his way, that Jane is. Its inner senses were focused in my direction.

As a result of the following sessions, for instance, we began “testing” physical reality for its subjective yields. We no longer took for granted the normal day with its succession of moments. Instead, we tried looking at time itself in a new way, practically speaking. We tried to experience it differently, particularly after the nineteenth session and an experiment in self-hypnosis that Rob tried on his own.