“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(We turned the one light off and sat in the dark. Sitting quietly with my eyes closed, I obtained a sighting or vision, in color, that I will note after describing this session. I believe it is part of the Joseph series, and will ask Seth about this. The vision involved a man walking down a road.

(We resumed at 8:40. I began to ask Jane questions at random. She answered each one, and if one of her answers suggested a line of thought I followed it up. Sitting in the darkness, we talked thus for a few minutes. The lights were off, but by now we could see fairly easily. The room was not pitch black. I had laid pen and paper by my elbow, and now I reached for them.

(Sarah lived 3 doors down the street in a dark front room. She had two brothers, one off someplace, he was a sailor. The other was younger. Sarah’s father did something for the cobbler, so he made shoes for the young brother and she was in the shop to get the shoes.

(They always carried pistols. The pistols were black and long, much longer than pistols of today. There was a jigger at the top that they used with powder. They kept powder in it, I don’t know what for. [Jane laughed.] They made bullets and put the powder into them. The powder and bullets were kept separate until they were put into the gun, though one or two bullets were always kept ready.

(They always saved the bullets if they could find them after using them. The metal was hard to get. The guns were awfully heavy, they didn’t shoot them much. These bullets were something new. They didn’t last, they stopped making them. For some reason I don’t understand the bullets might explode. The men didn’t want to keep the powder and the bullets together. Sometimes the powder was rusty and sometimes whitish. They were big bullets—one of the reasons the guns were so big.

(And Sarah, the first one, if she hadn’t burned to death she would have died anyhow at 17. It’s so funny, but she had tuberculosis. One lung was bad. It was a bad place to live. The village wasn’t sunny, and they kept the windows closed. There weren’t many windows anyhow. The land was very rocky, and they just would build a house on a slab of rock, and it was always damp. They had dogs and cats.

(At one moment I thought I glimpsed, far ahead on the horizon on the right, a group of pyramids, in some kind of cool brilliant color, blues or greens. I could not see the bases of these structures and am not positive they were even pyramids. The whole viewpoint of this data was very dramatic, low, very close to the ground. I seem to remember being able to see the soles of the feet, wrinkled and brown and without shoes, lifting after each stride. I recall them being covered with dust. It was a vigorous stride.)