“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.

(“And now the wrist—see how it thickens and turns white?” Jane’s wrist did thicken. She sat with the wrist of her left hand pressed to the table top. She wore a black sweater with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms. The cold white light spread up over the thickening wrist, up the forearm to the sweater. Seth was smug and sardonic at the same time. “You didn’t think I could do it, did you my lovelies? But you have no idea of what you’re asking, of how difficult it is…”

(“For a first attempt I’m doing beautifully”, Seth said. “What do you think of that? Take a good look…” For some minutes we studied the effect before us. To me the extra fingers bent so grotesquely up looked waxen, almost wet, as though freshly molded. Jane did not appear to be frightened. She looked down at her own hand and talked steadily. Then gradually the extra fingers withdrew, disappeared. “Now the hand changes again,” Seth said. “It becomes a stubby fat one, a doctor’s short fat stubby-fingered hand… A surgeon’s hand, short and fat.” He repeated this several times. “Frank Watts had a hand like that,” Seth said. “Just like that. Frank Watts was a fathead,” he said with obvious satisfaction, even though Frank Watts was a personality fragment of Seth’s own entity.

(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.

(Jane and I agree on this account, but make no claims. We feel that some things did take place. We do not know whether one member hypnotized the other two, for example, and so influenced them. If so, this would be quite an accomplishment. We have not tried to hold another seance, partly because of time limitations, partly because of a fear of failure [we imagine], and partly because we want to learn more about such things from Seth before we try again.)