“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(The following pages of this account will be called A B C D E etc., for insertion into the record after this page. Yet at the same time the continuity of the board sessions will not be broken by a mass of material other than derived from the board.

(“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.

(“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.

(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.

(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 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.

(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.)