“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.

I was less than impressed with Malba and with the session. For one thing, I distrusted the “prediction” that the Seth Material would be published.

“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.

“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 particular atmosphere surrounding your personalities just prior to the animals’ deaths was short-circuited and filled with inner panics. I do not want to hurt your feelings. This is, I’m sorry to say, a natural occurence often on your plane. The fact is that the animals caught your emotional contagion and, according to their own abilities, translated it for themselves.

In the cats’ deaths, both inherited the peculiar illness, which was a virus, that killed them. In the case of the first cat, you were able to reinforce its strength and maintain its health for some time. Then you needed your energies for yourselves. The second cat barely enjoyed such reinforcement at all and quickly succumbed. (We’d obtained both kittens from the janitor at the art gallery. Both had the same mother.)

Your dog’s illness was incipient. You could not have maintained his health for many years in any case. I would like to make it clear that animals do have energy to maintain their own health, but this is reinforced as a rule by the vitality of the human beings to whom they may be emotionally attached. The fact is that you were unable to give your dog the added vitality at a time when he needed it most. There is no need to blame yourselves. It was beyond your control at your stage of development then.

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.

The interior universe had its influence even as far as pets were concerned! The whole concept fascinated me. Seth showed us in the next session that not only animals but all living things had their primary existence in this inner world. He also carried on with his discussion of the ego and health, giving an excellent analysis of the ego’s relationship to the personality as a whole. I took what he said to heart and found myself opening up, becoming more free and creative. In this session, he also spoke about the consciousness of trees in such a way that I was never able to look at the trees outside of my window with the same old detachment. Through the sessions, the whole world seemed to come alive.

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.)

The fact that the fearful ego was beginning to tighten explains your reaction to the exercises. The ego can build up around the inner self like a glacier, and the exercises help melt it away. Even the prickles in your neck are like tiny picks chipping away at icy fears. … You were released so quickly as a result of the exercises that you didn’t know what had happened.…

The inner tree can continue to grow because the bark is resilient. It bends with the wind. It does not bend when there is no wind, nor does it stiffen, stopping the flow of sap to the treetop for fear that the dumb tree, not knowing what it was up to, would bump its head against the sky.

Much of the session had been directed to him. He sat, taking notes, as Seth dictated, stopping now and then to stare at him as he made a point. The session continued until nearly 1:00 A.M. The rest of it went into an analysis of the previous ten years, and was directed at both of us. All of this was fascinating, incidentally, and full of psychological insight that greatly helped us both.

And I was forced to smile back sheepishly. “As long as Seth talks about philosophical stuff, I don’t mind, I guess. But when he starts going into us, into personal habits and behavior, it gets kind of close.”

The material on trees fascinated me, though. Vegetation was not just alive, but aware. And yet, in a strange way, the world was also in a trance. The session inspired the following poem that I wrote a few days later.