“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane faced the painting as she sat in her Kennedy rocker, but my back was to it because of my position on the couch. During the several times I turned to look at it I noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Jane told me that Joseph, representing my own entity, smiled broadly at her in a way the painting actually doesn’t. The expression in the eyes changed first, the smile spreading from them down to the mouth. The forehead didn’t move. It was as though the painting became abruptly alive, although the painted head of Ruburt did not change.

(2. My effect concerns an interference in my vision, without an actual loss of sight. It produced no aftereffects this evening, nor had it ever in earlier years beyond a very slight headache. Tonight I didn’t get the headache. Strangely I’ve never been alarmed by this phenomenon. With my somewhat secretive nature I’d had no urge, even as a child, to tell my parents about it, or to see a doctor. The absence of aftereffects, and the continued clarity of my mental processes, may have been reassuring.

(The rest of the sentence is unintelligible in my notes. Here is the way I actually wrote it: “The spirit tre is never n a state of nethigness, with its conscescness x x extenigly. It os very important tre thanch be realize, fr thre if ech expct if a sctich it is …”

Give us a moment. This was an exercise, actually, in the manipulation of consciousness. Close to death, this same sort of thing happens in varying degrees when the consciousness realizes that it can no longer express itself through the mediumship of the body. If the dying person overidentifies with the body then he can easily panic, thinking that all expression is therefore cut off, and for that matter that his consciousness is about to be extinguished.