“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

“She didn’t say you had to. Only that you could if you wanted to. See what Seth has to say about Malba in our next session. I’ll ask him to comment, if he doesn’t on his own.”

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.

(To begin, we sat silently at the board, hands on the pointer. Almost at once, Jane began to hear Seth mentally. After taking a few words through the board, she set it aside, stood up and began to speak for Seth as she paced about the room. Her eyes darkened considerably. At times they seemed to contain no highlights. This was our longest session to date, and at its end we were both weary.)

Now, in a deep trance the subject, though fully aware of what is happening in the trance, may remember nothing of it afterward. The awareness of plant life is also somewhat like that of the subject in deep trance. Except for the suggestion and stimulus received by regular natural forces on your plane, the plant life does not bestir itself in other directions. But like the trance subject, our plant is aware. Its other abilities lie unused for the time, and latent, but they are present.

If, for example, our tree bark grew fearful of stormy weather and began to harden itself against the elements, in a well-meaning but distorted protective spirit, then the tree would die. This is what the ego does when it reacts too violently to purely physical data. As a result, it stiffens, and then you have, my well-meaning friend, the cold detachment with which you at one time faced the world.