“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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 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…”

(Jane’s hand slowly regained its normal shape. She still sat with it turned palm up. Now Seth extended himself. The fingers began to elongate noticeably, and to whiten. Then, a second set of fingers began to rise up, over Jane’s own fingers. Now, it would have been easy enough for Jane to bend her own fingers up into this position. But here the three of us saw now a second set of five fingers rising up, long and white. And moreover, this set of fingers had the fingernails on top. The nails were to be easily seen. Had they been Jane’s own fingers, the nails would have been on the undersides, and invisible.)

(“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 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.

(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’s hand returned to the table and resumed again its pawlike shape. “Now,” Seth said to me, “very carefully, reach out and touch the hand. I want you to carefully touch it so that you will see what it is like.” I touched my fingertips to Jane’s palm. The hand, pawlike, clublike, felt very cold to me, wet and clammy, and the skin had a bumpy feeling that I was not used to in Jane’s hand.

(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.

(“Now,” Seth said, “look into the mirror.” The red candle was still on, though hidden behind the curtains. Since the mirror is tall and narrow, we had to crowd in close on three sides of the little table, in order to see our reflections. But we could pick them out. Jane sat in the middle. Her lips were very close to my ear as she talked now; I could hear and feel each breath she took, each swallow she took; her voice dropped considerably in volume and I had the sensation that she was indeed speaking for someone else.

(“Now the three of you see your reflections in the mirror, just as you should… Now watch closely, for I am going to change Jane’s image in the mirror, I am going to replace it with another. Watch the shape of the head. Closely now, for this is very difficult…”

(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.