“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

My own imperfect recollection following Tam’s request that I look for it was that Seth, Dreams … was an unfinished collection of records, ideas, and chapters that Jane had struggled with for several years, without selling it. Instead, what I found in a box in the basement was, to my amazement, a completed manuscript — a full book ready to go, one as fresh as it had ever been, and my wife had struggled with it. What emerged as Laurel Davies and I searched Jane’s and my records, including early Seth sessions, was a long story of our doubts and gropings in an area in which we had no guidance except for our own explorations. Seth, Dreams … was rejected by three major publishers while Jane worked on it during 1966-67. She was still an unknown in the field; by mid-1966 she’d had only one small psychic book, How to Develop Your ESP Power, published. Our subject of interest itself was largely denied validity by the social, psychological, and scientific establishments. We were still operating alone, then, even though Jane had been speaking for Seth for about three years. In spite of all of her questions, however, her strong creative vitality — her intuitive insistence upon using her most unusual abilities — kept her focusing ahead, and I helped her as much as I could. I’m still astonished when I think of what Jane was to accomplish in the next few years.

October 10, 1984. Both of us had jobs at the large hospital in my home town of Sayre, Pa., eighteen miles southeast of Elmira, N.Y. The setting and the buildings weren’t like those of the “real” hospital in Sayre, though. It was a gorgeous summer day. Jane was much younger than she’d been when she died at the age of fifty-five. She still had her long jet-black hair, slim active figure and exuberant personality. I could have been my own age, sixty-five. We relaxed upon a large, sloping, very green lawn beside a brick hospital building that was several stories high. Then with great surprise I saw that on top of the near end of the building there sat an old, flat-sided, two-story house with steep roofs, weathered a drab gray and with all of its windows shuttered. Caught in one shutter was a filmy pink garment like a negligee, fluttering in the breeze. Curiously, Jane and I stared up at the house perched so incongruously there, and we talked about trying to get up into it to see what it was like inside.

At the same time I knew that Jane had some sort of deep commitment. However, this didn’t stop her from giving me a series of face-to-face hugs, very close, smiling like she does in some old photos of her that I’d found in a file yesterday. I was leery of responding too openly to her advances, though, since I didn’t know what her commitment was. A beautiful arching stone bridge was to my right as we talked and hugged. The lawn extending underneath the bridge was an extremely rich green — glowing and pulsing as though it was alive.

The night was so warm that I unzipped the bag all the way down to my feet. In the half-dark I spoke aloud to my wife, telling her that I wished she was with me. I fell asleep. Around 4:30 A.M. I woke to the sound of a heavy wind and the feel of much colder air creeping in around my body. The wind chimes hanging in a corner of the porch were clashing together repeatedly. I zipped up the bag as spatters of rain began to blow in on me. The woods come down over the crest of the hill in back of the house, to the north, and with a sound like an ocean tide the wind was racing through their treetops, plunging south past the house and into the valley. Jane and I had always loved that great roar. The trees thrashed in my neighbor’s yard across the road. The whole scene was one of change and energy and mystery.

It was midnight before the session ended. After it was over, and our salesman friend left for his motel in a nearby town, Seth came through with a few personal remarks for Rob. [...] My mind was a whirl. I knew that I felt that Seth was near, but, intellectually, I was full of questions. [...] Did I feel Seth, or was I indulging in fantasies of a highly dangerous nature?

While there was no specific entry point as far as human consciousness was concerned, there was a point (in your terms) where it did not seem to exist. The consciousness of being human was fully developed in the caveman, of course, but the human conception was alive in the fish.

[...] My previous nervousness was like a dream. I was aware of nothing except of a great supporting energy and, someplace far off, the room in which my body walked. [...] He was to attend many other sessions. [...] Some excellent evidential material was to be obtained through sessions with Mark several years later. He was to recall Seth’s warning to cut down on drinking because of his predisposition to gout; he came down with gouty arthritis.

This was to be the first time Seth really spoke to anyone else. I was half reluctant to hold a session and half curious as to how Seth would handle other people. I was also quite nervous. The session was actually a breakthrough in many respects, as these excerpts will show. [...]

Then suddenly, I was back again, seeing the later time. [...] One lung was bad. It was a bad place to live. [...] The land was so rocky … and they would build a house on a slab of rock, and it was always damp. … Sarah’s dress was dirty. It was woolen, a brown natural color because it wasn’t dyed. [...]

“The cobbler was comparatively well off, though not wealthy. He was fifty-three when he died. The boy, Albert, was too young to take over the shop, and for a couple of years the village had no cobbler, and the boy was a fisherman. [...] His wife’s name was also Sarah. She was a cousin of Sarah Wellington’s. Most of the people in the village were related in one way or another; they had no other place to go.”

[...] There was fishing all year long. [...] The water was warm in the winter. That’s why it was so foggy. They didn’t farm too much because the ground was poor and rocky, very hilly; so they depended on fish.”

“The cobbler was an old man. He was also the sexton of a small church, the Church of England. [...] His wife was fifty-three, Anna. She wore glasses and had grayish white hair and was very stout and messy.

“Everything that she said was of a piece,” Rob told me later. [...] 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. [...] It was so stark and undramatic that it really rang a bell. [...]

Supposedly it was here where she met her husband, who was a foreman in the plant. [...] He was not English himself but was visiting relatives there. [...] The ground was poor, and Malba mentioned the place several times in a rather derogatory way.

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. [...] 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 next thing she knew she was running across a field, looking for help, not realizing that she was dead. [...] Malba was bitter about this. [...]

Now I was really frightened. Was I a ghost? The warm sunlight was everywhere on the lawns, and the shadows were real. There was no doubt that this was the physical world. [...] Maybe I was delirious? But I was thinking rationally.

I wasn’t used to any messages from Seth when I was out of the house, and I’d been in the habit of discouraging any when I wasn’t having a session. The whole affair was disturbing. I was glad to get back out in the spring night air. There was little need to stay, and again, it was a session night.

She’d almost tear the apartment apart looking for the threatening letter that she was sure had come in the mail. She was so persuasive that the first two times this happened, I wondered if she was getting threatening mail, as unlikely as this seemed. [...] So, for a while it was touch and go. I was very worried about her.

[...] Consciousness was independent of the body — Seth was right — and if that was true, then there was no reason why he couldn’t be what he said he was: an independent personality, out of the flesh. [...]

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. [...]

[...] The results were so immediate and excellent, and Rob was so limp when he finished, that both of us were amused. [...] 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. [...]

[...] He was really laughing now, and I sulked. I realized he was right the moment he spoke.

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. [...]

[...] It was snowing slightly. I was in the front of the apartment doing the weekly housecleaning. Rob’s mind was on some innocuous chore, now forgotten; he may have been applying gesso ground to a series of panels to be used for paintings. [...] Although it was not exteriorized, it was clear in detail and very vivid. Like other experiences of this nature, it was intrusive, in that it seemed to have no connection with what he was doing or thinking at the time.

In the next session, Seth told Rob that he was doing well and should try the exercise often. The session, the twenty-second, was one of our first spontaneous sessions. [...] Two sessions a week were more than sufficient, I thought — I was afraid of going into trance at the drop of a hat.)

[...] 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. [...]

[...] For one thing, since it was spontaneous rather than planned, I hadn’t been at all nervous. [...] 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.

[...] He could see the change that came over me while I was speaking for Seth, and Seth inspires confidence. [...] Almost from the beginning he was an objectified personality to Rob; a visitor regardless of the unconventional situation; someone in whose ideas Rob was tremendously interested. On the other hand, I only knew what had been said when the trance (or the fun) was over. It was a terrific change for me to suddenly have to rely on someone else — even Rob — to tell me what “I” had been saying for a period of two or three hours.

“I really felt that someone else was here, that Seth was looking out the window,” Rob said, when the session was over. “It was … nostalgic.” [...]

If you recall, part of your mind was conscious in usual terms. You were capable of normal conversation; another part of your psyche was completely dissociated and waiting for your command. [...]

We didn’t realize it at the time, but in these early sessions, Seth was gently leading us down the “garden path” — it became more difficult to think of the world in the usual terms, for example. Even though I had come to no conclusions as to what Seth was or wasn’t, the Seth material itself fascinated me. [...]

The first time, the sensation was not as strong as the next two times. [...] I waited quietly, and in a moment or two the sensation was gone. I was balanced on the arm of our davenport, talking to our company. I had the odd feeling that the sensation was related both to the subject of conversation, and to some kind of message or communication I felt within me.

While writing out this statement, I’m reminded that I experienced a milder version of the same sensation last month, while I was working at my part-time job in the art department of a local greeting card company. I was alone in the art room, eating lunch at my desk, when the feeling swept over me. There was no warning or pain, but the surprise doubled me over my desk. I was frightened, thinking it might be some kind of an attack then, but it passed quickly and did not return.

Your feeling of a door or funnel is quite legitimate, however, and if you felt attacked because of the onrush of data that seemed to crash down upon you, it was only because of your inability to control the volume, so to speak. You switched yourself off automatically because the experience frightened you, but the whole affair was beneficial since it gave you some first-hand experience with pure inner sensory data. It was unfortunate that it was so uncontrolled, but I’m afraid this can often be expected in the beginning. [...]

[...] My back was acting up, work was difficult, and by suppertime, I was drained. I did not really feel like taking fifteen to twenty pages of dictation from Seth; I was concerned lest I miss some of the material.