“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(However, once the three of us began talking about a “seance” [a word I did not want to use describing our sessions and experiments], getting into the mood, we found ourselves trying things that ordinarily we might not have considered.

(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.

(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.)

(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.

(“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.