“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane’s hand began to change its general proportions. Slowly, with Seth’s monologue in our ears, the hand came to resemble a pawlike shape. I had the eerie feeling of an animal’s forepaw. Jane’s fingers, normally long and graceful, had shrunken to stubby appendages, or so it appeared. The glow suffused the palm, eliminating the shadows normally to be seen there, so that it did not seem the fingers were merely folded over.

(“And you,” he said to Bill, “have been twice a man and once a woman. You should be very careful of high places. They are dangerous for you. Once before on earth, you climbed a tree to escape from animals.” Here Seth laughed. “You got away from the animals all right, but you fell asleep in your tree that night. You fell out, landed on your head, and were killed. You were 46. The apparition you saw beside your bed last summer was a personality fragment out of your past, warning you that you have an imbalance as far as height is concerned. You should be careful.” At the time he saw the apparition, Bill, who is a schoolteacher, had a summer job painting houses. He often worked from high ladders.

(Jane said later that this surprised her, indeed shocked her, more than anything else. She knew she was looking into the mirror. I looked at her, first, beside me, then into the mirror. I saw her head turned down in the mirror; I also saw a shadow suffuse the mirror image. At the same time, I had the feeling that the face, now somehow animal-like in the shadows, hung forward of the body, that it had somehow detached itself from the shoulders. The head grew still smaller. I thought I detected a faint glow about it as it hung in space, seemingly between the mirror reflections and the three of us.