“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I asked Jane to lay her wedding ring on the table. The three of us joined hands around the ring. Sitting quietly in the dim light, staring at the ring, I soon realized that with a nudge or two from the imagination the unwary observer might not have too much trouble seeing what he wanted to.

(With considerable relish Seth described in detail each phenomena that followed—so that, as he said, there would be no doubt as to what took place. He began by telling us to watch Jane’s thumb. The tip of it began to glow. It seemed to be an internal suffusing of the flesh with a cold white light; there was no radiant effect, merely the changing color of the flesh itself.

(“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.

(“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.

(I would estimate that a good hour was taken up by the above proceedings. Usually the changes in shape and color took place quite slowly. Our interest was of course intense the whole time. We did exactly as Seth told us to; often, for instance, I wanted to reach out and grasp Jane’s hand while it was in metamorphosis, but I did not touch it until Seth said to. During the whole time, Jane-Seth spoke constantly. The dialogue, while unmistakably Seth, had the added fillips of an almost macabre wit and a biting sarcasm. Often Seth remarked upon our rather childish desire for demonstrations; yet when I asked him if he would rather we refrained from such requests in the future, he said he understood the desire, that it was natural, and that if he felt like it he would comply.

(“This isn’t a lunch meeting,” Seth snapped at me through Jane, for I was still finishing a piece of candy. “Nor is it a circus session. Your bathroom is much too light for what you desire. White is a very poor color for what you are asking.” When I asked if he required total darkness to be at his best, he replied, “We make light from darkness.”

(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.