“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The regular 11th session, scheduled for Monday, December 23/63, was not held for various reasons. The main one of course was the fact that the holidays were close at hand; and beside having company we also did some traveling. Thus the regular schedule was broken, and required some effort on our parts to restore. We did not manage to resume until this unscheduled session of January 1; and by then we wondered whether we could resume.

(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.

(This account will also draw from the chapter on seances in Jane’s projected book on ESP. She made detailed notes on our amateur seance the day after it took place, when her memory was fresh. And she will check over this account before it goes into the record.

(A tiny point of light grew on the edge of the ring. But by moving my arm, I discovered I could make this light wink on and off; it was simply red reflection from the candle. So I placed the light behind the curtains, where it was much diffused.

(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.

(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.

(Since the hand was in shadow to begin with, there was no mistaking the change.

(“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 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.

(“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.

(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.

(Seth then had the cold inner light suffuse Jane’s wrist and palm to an even more remarkable degree. At the joining of hand and wrist, the flesh rose up in an egglike lump; the light crept up Jane’s arm to her sweater, and bled down her fingers until all semblance of shadow was gone. Then, to end this part of the demonstration, Seth had Jane place her hands side by side so that we could plainly see the difference between the two. It was easily seen.

(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.”

(“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.

(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.

(There was no doubt that we saw an image in the mirror that sat several inches lower than Jane herself sat, and that the mysterious head would dip down and then hang forward of the body. The strongest impression I had was of the change in proportion of the head, and the sensed or felt alien presence of a snoutlike creature confronting us.

(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.