“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Her maiden name was Shilcock. She grew up with an aunt and older brother, married at eighteen and worked in a dress or textile plant in Decatur, South Dakota. She could not describe her duties. We had great trouble with the name ‘Decatur.’ This is my interpretation of what she said, and now I wonder if I made a mistake. Her pronounciation was something like Dek-a-tur, with the accent on the first syllable.

Supposedly it was here where she met her husband, who was a foreman in the plant. He died in 1962 in Marlboro, England. He was not English himself but was visiting relatives there. While her husband worked in the factory, he also owned a farm outside of Decatur, and after marriage the couple moved there. The ground was poor, and Malba mentioned the place several times in a rather derogatory way.

They were married twenty-eight years and had a son and daughter. The son is still alive, in California, around the Los Angeles area. Malba didn’t know where the daughter was, but she did know that her son now had two boys of his own. She told us that she worked in the factory for only a few months. Although obviously not intelligent, she showed an awareness of her comparative ignorance, and she regarded education as important.

According to what she told us, she died in the farmhouse kitchen. She was standing at the sink washing dishes and looking out at the ‘dreary’ flat landscape and at their pickup truck parked there. She felt a sharp pain in her chest, and died of a heart attack. She fell to the floor, breaking a plate as she did so.

The next thing she knew she was running across a field, looking for help, not realizing that she was dead. When she returned to the house she saw her body upon the floor … Her husband remarried seven months later. Malba was bitter about this. After his death, the second wife went to California to live with the stepson and his family, a fact that further upset Malba.

Malba said that she is still a woman where she is; she isn’t transparent, for instance. She was highly amused at the plight of the clergymen of different faiths, who had died, because the circumstances were so different than those they had expected.

She couldn’t explain much about her own situation, however, though she insisted that she was happier where she was than she had been in this life. Sometimes she was with others; sometimes alone. She didn’t know how she ‘got about,’ but knew that she could travel to other places on earth. ‘I don’t know how I do it,’ she said. ‘I’ll just find myself somewhere.’ Nor could she describe how she got through to us. ‘I’m here, though, aren’t I?’ she said.

Actually she was fairly inarticulate. She did say that she had no particular sense of light and dark, or sense of time. She remarked quite spiritedly that I asked a lot of questions, but added that she liked us because we didn’t make fun of her.

She couldn’t explain what she did, except to say that she ‘learned things.’ I asked further questions about her background and was told that her husband had grown alfalfa and wheat and tried tobacco and corn. She said again that he was a poor farmer and that her life had been a lonely one, since she had few friends. She knew the clerks in the town, and that was all. She did tell me, when asked, that Decatur had a population of about twelve thousand.

“Everything that she said was of a piece,” Rob told me later. “She sounded well-meaning, but not too bright. The impression that she was herself was definite … she didn’t seem anything like you. Her laugh was completely different … as was her way of using words. Her vocabulary was very limited, for example, and her voice had a petulant tone. The description of her death really struck me. It was so stark and undramatic that it really rang a bell. Not only that, but she still seemed bewildered by it herself.”

“But what’s the point of it, providing it was legitimate, just for the sake of argument?” I said. “I guess I’ll ‘specialize’ with Seth. I can’t see just trying to pull people in, if that’s an apt phrase, for nothing.”

(And in the next (nineteenth) session on January 17, 1964, Seth did carry his discussion on the inner sense further, and he gave us additional clues as to how we could use them. As you’ll see, we were shortly to put his methods to work. The session was a long one, and he began by emphasizing the fact that all physical sense data was camouflage.)

I was really quite tired, yet after the session, I was astonished to discover that Seth had dictated an excellent exposition on the physical senses and had begun a description of the inner ones. According to Rob, he behaved in a most energetic fashion, pacing the room as usual, stopping to joke with Rob, or pausing for a moment to look out the window. Whatever energy was being used, I decided, it was certainly more than I expected myself capable of that night. This was the twentieth session, January 29th. The session began as usual at 9:00 P.M. and ended at 11:40. Again, only excerpts are being given. Seth began by speaking about the physical senses.

Rob was taking down the dictation so quickly he hardly looked up. “No,” he said.

This sense would permit our man to feel the basic sensations felt by the tree, so that instead of looking at it, his consciousness would expand to contain the experience of what it is to be a tree. According to his proficiency, he would feel in like manner the experience of being the grass and so forth. He would in no way lose consciousness of who he was, and he would perceive these experiences again, somewhat in the same manner that you perceive heat and cold. …