“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Keep your regular work habits intact. I know I need not tell you this, far be it from me when I know your habits so well. When you were worldly you were the fleshiest man I knew. Now in your compensation you show the same tenacity of purpose.

(Break at 9:50. To date the above monologue is the longest answer we have received. During its delivery Jane talked at a steady rate, just slow enough for me to be able to take it down word for word in longhand. Shorthand would be a great help. During this dictation Jane neither stopped, speeded up, backtracked, gave any indication of confusion, stopped or started anew.

Everything on your plane is a materialization of something that exists independent of your plane. Therefore within your senses there are other senses that perceive inward. Your regular senses perceive, or as Jane would like to say create, an outer world. The senses within them, that is within the recognizable senses, perceive and create an inner world, they perceive part of an inner world. This is difficult for me to explain to you. However as your regular senses are limited according to the plane which you inhabit—in your case dear friends on your plane extremely limited, I’m afraid—so are the corresponding inner senses limited.

On your plane no action is really simultaneous and so time instantly enters in. You mentioned yourself Joseph—oh see, you can’t hide anything from me—you mentioned earlier—I’m sorry, Ruburt needs a short break. A short one, Ruburt, should suffice.

When I refer back to myself or back to what I have said in an earlier session, I do not expend an identical amount of time in doing so. That is, if two hours of your time were necessary for me to give you certain material it does not take me the same amount of time to refer back to the whole body of the same material.

The action and counteraction is the time trigger. To you this will be almost unbelievable, but on some other planes motion is simultaneous and time unknown. To me time can be manipulated, used at leisure and examined. To me your time is a vehicle, one of the several vehicles by which I can enter your awareness. It is therefore still a reality of some kind to me. Otherwise I could not utilize it in any manner whatsoever. As an example of my good intentions I will end this session.

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.

Besides, you owe me a session, having missed one.

In one sense meeting with you costs me little energy, it is true. On the other hand the effort to communicate explanations does involve very real effort on my part. And so you are not the only ones who grow weary in this respect. As I have said, feeling is action, and in my communications to you feeling plays a strong part.

The trouble is, you see, you look upon me as a veritable fountain of knowledge, and I would also be known as a personality in myself and as a friend.

I have to admit that you’ve lost me completely. Because we experience play why does that mean we experience anger? In your terms we experience emotions and therefore are capable of anger. However we are so disciplined that anger seldom arises.

The one thing that pleases me immensely is the way Ruburt can translate at least a few of my humorous remarks and inflections of my natural speech. It is difficult to carry to you at this point but I have hopes of doing better. Ruburt’s voice is an experiment. The immediacy of our sessions would be enhanced if more of my personality could come through. I could go on quite happily, you might say blithely, for hours but I shall not. I would if I thought I could get away with it.

I am not some old fogy. Now and then old Frank Watts comes through simply because he is the latest independent materialization, and is used to taking things upon himself. I have not assimilated him completely but you can believe me, I intend to.

I’m afraid I haven’t learned humility yet. On the other hand you knew me before I knew Frank Watts, and my vanity was astounding. You were quite vain yourself, and as a woman you certainly put your present wife to shame as far as vanity is concerned.

There is no weather, whether or not you think there is. This involves far more than a playful question, and would take me at least a month to answer.

Ruburt, if you want a cigarette get one. She’s been walking around with a match in her hand for the last ten minutes. And don’t blame me Ruburt for your oversmoking.

If I could have a glass of wine with you and enjoy it, I would. If you want Ruburt to talk only for a few moments to me without the record, go ahead. I’ll certainly last as long as Ruburt will and a lot longer.

Please don’t ask me to recite poetry again. It was never one of my lines. Ruburt has always been gifted artistically, as you have Joseph. With you, your art talents lay beneath layers of fleshy lust at times. You were exceedingly lecherous in Denmark, and I was not much better.

(I had an extremely strange and uncomfortable experience last night. Worse, I don’t know what initiated the odd condition in which I was in for some three hours. Beyond doubt it was some sort of somnambulistic state, I think a sort of self-induced trance. The thing that worries me is that I wasn’t trying to put myself in a trance as far as I know.

(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 made coffee for me. I didn’t believe I could lift the cup. When I finally did my motions were extremely slow, as in a motion picture played slow. It seemed impossible to exert any pressure in the physical world at all. Rob made me drink two cups of coffee; I stood with my head out the window in the cold night air. Nothing seemed to help. I was thoroughly frightened by now, yet thought that I could snap out of it if I really wanted to; and knew how to.

(Since my senses seemed so acute, Rob asked me to read a letter on my bulletin board, the small print on a match cover, and a few lines from a book, all held out much further than I could usually manage. I read the stuff.

(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.