“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Besides normal reasons (Jane dictates:) he was psychically inclined, at a time when Jane was young and herself close to a past life. She sensed his deep and personal inner awareness. It confused and haunted him, since his inarticulateness applied also to thoughts within himself. He felt strongly but could not explain. In his solitary nature he came close to being a mystic but he was unable to relate his personality as Joseph Burdo with the social world at large, or even to the other members of his family. There was a block, regrettably. He felt strongly his connection with the universe as a whole and with nature as he understood it. But to him nature did not include his fellow human beings. The solitariness that besieged him—because it did besiege him—is dangerous to any personality unless it comes after identification with the human race.

That is, in his feeling of unity with All That Is, he excluded other human beings, and on your plane it is necessary for the personality to relate to them. Only after such relation is isolation of that nature of benefit. Jane sensed her grandfather’s feeling of identification with the rest of nature however, and since she had not yet developed a strong ego personality as a young child she felt no sense of rejection as did, for example, the other members of the family. When he spoke of wind she felt like wind, as any child will unself-consciously identify with the elements.

He never forgave his own children for growing up, nor did he forgive his wife for tending to earthly ways. Yet he related his own body, at least until the very end, very well with nature. He considered that he aged as a tree will age, but perversely he felt that others aged to spite him.

Seeing for example a crowd of people, even if you yourself were among the crowd, you cannot experience the feeling that you were experiencing when the picture was taken, and though you may see before you the pictures of people who stood in that crowd, neither you nor they can see or experience the emotions that they felt. There is much more to be said here. I must move into these things slowly.

I felt extremely pleased with your frames of mind this evening. I would continue if I did not have your physical limitations to contend with. For some reason I am able to come through very well, and when this happens I like to take advantage of the opportunity. After all, do you blame me? I admit that I miss you occasionally between sessions, dear friends; and Ruburt, your voice almost reminds me now of your old one.

(We debated whether to continue. Jane felt better now, and of course we were interested to try resuming in this fashion since it would be something new. Almost as if by signal Jane began to dictate again. We did not touch the board.)

(As nearly as I can recall it was then that I began to feel strange, as if something were going to happen. I put this feeling down to imagination. Almost at once I felt dissociated, drowsy, and sat in the rocker without rocking. My eyelids felt very heavy, my head slumped sideways. I could hardly keep awake but at the same time my senses were extremely acute; I could hear every sound in the house. Rob asked what was wrong. I answered that I felt very odd and unlike myself.

(My body was very light, weightless it appeared. I was conscious of no muscular weight or pressure at all. Particularly my shoulders were affected; my arms and hands felt like water or air. Rob told me to get up. He was beginning to feel worried. I could hardly rise from the chair, he had to help me to the couch. I didn’t feel physical enough to move.

(I felt as if I were heading into a very deep trance state of some sort, which I was fighting off. And yet I thought that I was supposed to be experimenting, and was tempted to go along with it. Fear got the best of me. While I stopped myself from going into a deeper state, I wasn’t able to snap out of what I was in.

(Rob thought the concentration of writing a statement on how I felt would help. Instead my efforts showed what a crazy state I was in. My handwriting just wasn’t my own. No pressure was exerted on the pen. The writing was wavery, very small, and grew even smaller. My prose expression was nothing like my own, childish in fact. Thought or messages or bits of conversation popped to mind and I wrote them down in this weird script.

(My condition: A feeling of weightlessness, of inability to function in the physical world, yet because my motions were so strange this gave Rob the impression that my limbs were heavy; to me they were light as air. I felt relaxed to the ninth degree. Yet all the while my senses were amazingly alert and I conversed with Rob more or less normally. My body seemed to have no physical resistance. When Rob took my hand it was very wet and floppy.

(The condition lasted from about nine to twelve PM. I slowly came out of it. My right arm and hand were the last to be released, however, and I still felt odd when finally I went to bed.

(I was sitting at my desk when I began feeling funny. I don’t know how. Then I sat in another chair & felt funnier. My hands felt very light & so did my shoulders. Light then almost as if they were not there at all.