“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We had been speculating about spending our immediately-past lives in Boston, since Seth had hinted at this in the last session. We opened the session by sitting silently at the board, but Jane began to receive Seth even as the pointer spelled out his greeting. She laid the board aside and began to dictate in a normal voice, pacing as usual.)

(Jane’s voice was still normal and her eyes had their usual darker look. But by now the rhythm of her pacing as she dictated Seth’s messages had picked up quite a bit. She was moving about faster than ever before; so much so that I began to think it might be extremely fatiguing if she kept it up.)

(Break at 9:35. Jane said the sentences making up this message were so long and involved that she made no effort to pay any attention to them while voicing them. This seemed strange to her because as a writer she is used to watching out for grammar, punctuation, etc.

It is as if a man found himself in a completely dark room, into which no sounds came. And he looked down, could not see his body, could not hear his voice, and therefore deduced that he had no body and no voice, even though he knew he had both a body and a voice before he entered that room. But he says “I will at any moment believe only what I can see, and though I am sure that I saw more at one time, now I can see nothing and so I have no body, since I cannot see it.”

(Break at 10:32. During break Jane seemed to become aware of several things at once. She said she thought she’d been in a trance of some kind almost from the beginning of the session. She had no memory of giving the above monologue; she said it was as though she had “vanished.” I told her that of course she was with me all the time, pacing so fast that at times it was distracting. The material, she said, came through with no distortion at all. She felt as though she were a pure vehicle; she had no conscious thoughts about it, she was hardly aware of her environment at all. She had a vague memory of picking up a wineglass once. Actually I had watched her smoke a couple of cigarettes while dictating, pace back and forth, pause to look out the windows, etc. She did not feel tired, nor had her voice shown any changes.

(Through this session her voice had been normal. However when she resumed dictation her voice abruptly changed pitch, rising several notes up the scale. It was not a falsetto voice yet was close to it, and was the first use of this kind of voice. She maintained it until the close of the session, along with her fast pacing. Resume at 11:27.)

(The next two sensations appeared somewhat later in the evening. The second one came perhaps after 11:30 PM, while we were sitting around the table eating. This sensation was so strong that I put down my sandwich and took off my glasses, because I literally did not know what to expect next. The wave of feeling washed over me very strongly. Although everyone about me was talking quite loudly, I had the weird sensation of voices within me, of mouths open or crying in soundless rhythm. I also felt, or sensed or perhaps glimpsed, a great chute or trough or pathway of some kind that reached down into me from above me, or at least from outside of me. I definitely felt apprehensive on this second occasion; I thought of some kind of attack, although there was no pain of any kind. The sensation in my chest was very strong. I believe, now that I look back, that this time I barely glimpsed the possibility that this might be an attempt at communication with me, from where I don’t know, or that perhaps it might be a premonitory warning. I believe I thought of my aging parents, but am not sure.