“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This session began without plan, and involved Jane, Bill Macdonnel and myself. It was the first one without the Ouija board. When it began, I for one had no thought that we would end up asking Seth for assistance, yet within an hour I found myself doing just this. I was quite reluctant to do so, since I felt it was better to continue with the board, and to accumulate a written record which might serve as a basis for other types of experiments at a later date.

(Certainly the results we obtained were surprising, and quite unexpected. The following pages contain my own account of what happened, written at various times as memory served. I will try to keep the events in chronological order. The parts containing quotes from Jane, Bill or myself will be rendered to the best of my recall, and if they are not accurate, I am sure their flavor will be. Just as I am sure that no claims will be made for anything that did not take place.

(As stated, I had to be dragged into this event by Jane and Bill, and went along, finally, quite reluctantly.

(I now asked Jane to place the ring in the upturned palm of her left hand. Sitting on my left, she held my left hand with her right, and I joined hands with Bill on my right. Nothing happened as we stared at the ring. I began to ask questions aloud, at random, searching for a presence or a sign, but I did not direct them at Seth. I wanted to see if the questions would help Jane establish contact with another entity or a fragment. Since we seemed to be getting nowhere, Jane began to answer me aloud. Still it appeared that we would get no results.

(Then Jane suddenly announced in a firm, clear voice: “Watch the hand.” It was a command, and I knew Seth was with us. Jane felt her left hand immediately grow cold. I asked no more questions, except rarely. Seth-Jane talked constantly from then on. Jane, Bill and I hunched over the table, over the left hand. The ring had slipped out of it by now.

(And now Seth incongruously told us that Bill Macdonnel’s entity name was Mark, and that Seth, Bill, Jane and I had all known each other in previous lives.

(“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.

(Now, while Jane still sat with her left wrist pressed to the table, her hand, turning white in part again, rose several inches [perhaps three by my estimate] up from the table. My hands were held by Jane on my left and Bill on my right, but Bill passed his free right hand beneath Jane’s hand to see that it was actually rising and was not an illusion. [Was Jane’s elbow dropping, so the hand rose up? I do not know.] But laughing, Seth told us plainly that when we had attained more proficiency, he would materialize a fully independent hand for us. He explained that he drew on all three of us for the psychic energy necessary to do this.

(We had turned no lights on during break. Now Seth rather imperiously commanded us to move our little table over a few feet so that it faced the doorway to our bathroom. Looking back, Jane, Bill, and I recall with some humor that we docilely followed Seth’s every order. The three of us sat shoulder to shoulder, staring into the bath, which is large and tiled with white. We were hoping to see a materialization of some kind in the open doorway, since we had discussed this at break.

(We could see our reflections clearly enough, even though dimly. As Jane continued to talk, her image did slowly begin to change in the mirror. Her head began to drop lower between Bill and I. At the same time, the shape of the skull changed, the hair grew shorter and fit around it much more closely. The shoulders of the image in the mirror hunched over, and grew narrower. And then the head tilted and looked down, while Jane stared straight ahead into the mirror.

(Jane was quite tired. It was after 10:00 PM. Bill Macdonnel was more impressed with the hand phenomena than the mirror demonstration. To Bill, while he thought he sensed a change in the shape of Jane’s head in the mirror, there was little else to be seen. He did not sense an aura, for example, or receive any impression of an alien countenance.