“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(At times the interference had covered a wide enough area so that I had a difficult time seeing the drawing paper before me, for instance, or the pencil I felt in my hand. The shimmering varied in intensity. On one occasion I lay down and closed my eyes simply because it was easier to do this than anything else. Such effects lasted half an hour at the most, usually less.

(Now, I wondered once again at my calm response to this as I grew up — to something whose origins were so completely outside any kind of knowledge I possessed. When the interference had been strong, covering most of the field of vision, I had experienced a peculiar sense of both darkness and light, with the objective world indistinguishable within what I can only describe as a field of patterned, alternating lightness and darkness that possessed a velvety depth.

(By the time I wrote the last sentence I was aware — again, without being upset — that it was taking me just a little longer than usual to come up with my abbreviations or symbols for such common words as “does,” “as,” and “even.” This action of course should have been automatic. But visual interference was now lifting considerably.

Such a belief in extinction, such a certainty that identity is about to be blotted out in the next moment, is a severe psychological experience, that in itself can bring about unfortunate reactions. What happens instead is that you find consciousness quite intact, and its expression far less limited than it was before. Joseph chose subconsciously to interrupt those methods of expression he was using at the time simply so that their interference would claim due notice.