“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It was a fascinating session. Seth told Rob that he’d seen only part of the room, described the rest of it and gave further details about Dick’s English life. The session lasted until 11:15 when Rob, not Seth, got tired, and suggested that we stop for the night. Seth said, Sleepy time is no crime. Now I am no poet, and you know it. Rob laughed, because Seth likes to tease me about my poetry.

Then, last night, I stood at the window and looked out across the Walnut Street Bridge. I visualized myself walking across it and felt the wooden flooring beneath my feet. I felt myself walk beneath the signal light at the far end of the bridge and let myself continue on along the street. Finally I tried to reach out and envelop the feeling of the houses and trees on either side of me — to sense them as if by inner touch, as I passed each one by.

He was right, of course. In those days, I’d put him on probation and myself as well. And I never tried to visualize him. I could reconcile a mental voice as a valid and quite safe mechanism of the creative subconscious, as I liked to call it — but an image next to me in the kitchen while I did the dishes? Never!

I always enjoyed the lively art of conversation, said Seth’s mental voice to me.

“Uh, He says that he always enjoyed the lively art of conversation,” I said. The dish towel was still in my hand. Rob looked at me and laughed.

I was in trance almost at once. Well, the chickadees must be restless tonight, Seth began. Incidentally, I rarely attend your little apartment unless in one way or another you ask me to, and tonight you were yelling my name from the rooftops, he said.

This method suits me temperamentally. It seems to me that automatic writing could become like an institution. It is so one-sided. I enjoy the questions that you do manage to get in. Often they remind me of other things I would like to say … I have never trusted the written word half as much as I trust the spoken word, and on your plane it is difficult to trust either, but as I mentioned, I always enjoyed conversation, which is the liveliest of the arts.

During all this time the curtains were open. It was not yet quite dark. There were voices and footsteps in the hall, Rob told me later, but I was not bothered at all. In fact, quite without knowing it, I was pacing about, talking as Seth, carrying an unlit cigarette. Finally Seth said, This is a very pleasant little session. For heaven’s sake, Ruburt, get yourself a match. The suspension and suspense is killing me. Will she or won’t she light that cigarette? Please find a match.

Because Ruburt deals in words, it is easy for me to communicate in this way. He automatically translates inner data given by me into coherent, valid and faithful camouflage patterns. The data that I give is not actually sound on my part. Its transference is automatic and instantaneous on Ruburt’s part, and is performed through the inner workings of the mind, the inner senses and the brain.

There is so much to say, Seth said once. I could run on for hours, but you would probably catch me. … It is fun to tease you. I always did, and you taunted me back.

I just snorted when Rob told me about this data after the session. Still, the session impressed me. For one thing, since it was spontaneous rather than planned, I hadn’t been at all nervous. For another, afterwards I felt surrounded by a residue of Seth’s good-humored affection. This feeling was directed at me as well as at Rob, which meant that it wasn’t coming from me. After the session was over, it seemed to follow me out into the kitchen while I finished the dishes.

When Rob typed up the session and I read it, I went around in a daze of wonder. Like many other people, I’d distrusted the “inner” self to a considerable degree, believing that it held only repressed primitive emotions and buried, unsavory characteristics. But without it, we couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning or breathe, much less walk across the floor. Now this seems so obvious that it is almost impossible to remember what a revelation it seemed at the time. The next day, the session inspired me to write the following poem.

And while I speak to you, my lungs
Rise and fall behind breastbones,
Fill their secret tissue mouths
With the air that swirls in this bright room.
They breathe for me the very breath
Upon which all I am depends,
Yet I do not know how this is done.
Who is this ghost,
This other one?
Who moves the lung? Who breathes?

The mover, the breather, the dreamer
Shares with me this fond flesh.
He is a twin so like myself
That I cannot recognize his face.
He goes his way and I go mine.
We never meet head-on, and yet
I am aware of this ghost
Behind my every word or act.
Who moves? Who breathes?
Who dreams?

If the twenty-third session roused me to write the poem, it also impressed Rob deeply enough so that he tried a rather complicated experiment with the inner senses — without letting his conscious mind know what he was up to.