“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This session did not involve Seth in any way. His presence was not asked for, and he did not appear during the evening. This was an experiment tried, however, more or less at his suggestion that we try different things.

(It was already dark outside, but we pulled our blinds and put one red Christmas light on. We sat at our dark-topped walnut table in the living room. Upon it we had spread a triangular piece of black cloth. We also wore dark clothing. On the cloth we lay Jane’s wedding ring. It was very dimly visible; we sat opposite each other, hands flat upon the cloth and sometimes touching, with the ring always visible between our hands. We sat quietly. Nothing happened, though we felt we might be cultivating a mood. After a while we substituted for the ring a Spanish-American military insignia, of brass, that Jane’s grandfather had secured from his brother. It was part of a medal; Jane had polished it the day before, and removed the ribbon.

(The cobbler was an old man. He had something to do with being the sexton of a church. It was a small church, not Catholic. It was a Church of England. The cobbler used to ring the bells. His wife was 53, she was named Anna. She wore glasses and had grayish white hair, she was stout and messy.

(There was a boy in the shop too. He wasn’t their son, just an apprentice to the cobbler. He slept in the kitchen. His name was Albert, Albert Lang. He was 11, I think. The cobbler and his wife didn’t have any children. She had trouble with her glasses. This was strange, because most people didn’t have them. I don’t know where she got them, in another town, but they weren’t very good. Handmade, they had to grind the glass and stuff. They were like magnifying glasses, in a frame on her nose.

(The cobbler was comparatively well off, though not wealthy. He was 53 years old when he died. The boy Albert was too young to take his place when he died, so the village didn’t have a cobbler for a couple of years. The boy was a fisherman for a while. Then another cobbler came and Albert helped him in the shop.

(Albert did okay. He got married, and his wife’s name was Sarah too. She was a cousin of Sarah Wellington. There were lots of cousins in the village. Most of the people were related, they had no place else to go.

(A few could write. They could write their own names but they couldn’t read others’. Sometimes a family would have a son go away to learn to write. Then he would teach his parents to write their names, but not often.

(I saw the feet of a man walking along a flat dusty reddish road. He was I think barefoot, though I wondered about some kind of rudimentary sandal. He carried no staff, and had what was apparently a brownish long robe flapping about the calves of his legs. The legs were thin. I could not see the man’s head or shoulders, or even his waist. The land was very flat, reds and browns. There was nothing but horizon in the far distance on the left side, beyond the feet.