“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

On January 17th, Rob and I tried another experiment together. This time, we decided not to have any “format” or particular plans but to leave ourselves open to whatever might happen. Before long, I began to speak for a personality called Malba Bronson, who told Rob that she had died in South Dakota in 1946 at the age of forty-six. The session lasted for an hour and a half; my voice was halting, with many pauses. I sat there, in the darkened room, hearing the voice as if it came from a great distance, feeling a mild astonishment.

Malba insisted that she was the same girl I saw die in Levonshire, England, in my earlier trance, except that her death had taken place when she was fourteen, not seventeen as I had reported. She told Rob that our work with Seth was a lifetime project, that we would publish his manuscripts, and help spread his ideas. She also informed Rob that I could contact the deceased for their living relatives if I wanted to, emphasizing that a good deal of trial and error would be involved as both of us learned to use our psychic abilities.

“You wanted to experiment tonight,” Rob said.

“We’ve only been at this a little over a month,” Rob said. “Aren’t you rushing things a bit?”

“Oh, that’s what the sense of outrage is about,” Rob said. He was really laughing now, and I sulked. I realized he was right the moment he spoke.

I’ll go along with your little joke about Malba Toast of the Midplane. Malba of the Midplane was your apt description. [Rob had made a remark to this effect earlier.] The midplane is indeed an excellent description of the semi-plane which she now inhabits. It is a waiting plane for personalities at certain stages of development.

The entire session ran three hours, and most of it was devoted to the ego and the subconscious and to their relationship to health and illness. While Rob’s back was vastly improved since Seth’s reincarnational sessions for him, he still had some bad days now and then. We’d been in the habit of blaming difficulties on the subconscious.

Here, however, Seth said to Rob,

“No, I’m O. K.” Rob said. We’d purchased the rocker earlier when Rob’s back was bothering him badly. Rob told me later that he was squirming some, as I paced back and forth, delivering this material as Seth.

The largest segment of the session dealt with personal matters connected with Rob’s earlier illness. This led Rob to wonder what had caused our three animals to die shortly before the sessions began.

I was crushed by this material when Rob read it to me after the session. We were both completely unacquainted with such ideas, yet, intuitively, we accepted them. Ever since, we’ve been very aware of the effect our behavior and moods have on our cats and have observed the same reinforcement or lack of it in other people’s relationship with their animals.

Following Seth’s suggestions, Rob began doing a few simple yoga exercises, and the night before the eighteenth session he used self-hypnosis to relax his muscles. The results were so immediate and excellent, and Rob was so limp when he finished, that both of us were amused. He looked so like a before-and-after advertisement. Before he began the exercises, he was very uptight, with sore muscles and a repressive body pose. Afterward, he was like some happy rag doll. Seth began to comment on this in the beginning of the next session. As usual, he used our personal experience as a basis for some excellent information with great general application.

“No, I’m okay.” Rob said.

But when I read the session, I thought of Rob sitting there, listening to what I thought of as criticism, while his wife paced the room “telling him off” in another voice and supposedly for another, invisible personality. “I worry that it’s just a psychological trick,” I said. “I mean, suppose that’s really what I think, subconsciously — the idea that your ego is too rigid at times and closes you off. So I simply adopt another personality to tell you so. Then I wouldn’t be responsible and you couldn’t talk back.”

“Is that what you think it is?” Rob asked.

“Do you realize that the entire session contained more psychological insight into me and more hints into my behavior than I’ve ever received in any way whatsoever? And that Seth just used me as an example to make more general pertinent points about the personality?” Rob grinned. “If it didn’t bother me, I don’t know why it’s bothering you.”

“I suppose that’s natural enough,” Rob said. “Does it bother you that much?”

“Uh-huh. Not really.” I said. But in the beginning, at least, I wasn’t used to probing psychological analysis directed at Rob or myself from an invisible personality — or anyone else. Now we wonder how we managed to function effectively without all the knowledge about ourselves that we’ve received from Seth through the years.