“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last Wednesday afternoon, April 22, 1964, Jim Beckett visited me briefly. He is a computer service technician whom Jane and I had met but two or three times some months ago, before the sessions began. We became acquainted with him when he was a TV repairman. He is also a ham radio operator and a science-fiction fan; thus the three of us got along well from the beginning, when we met Jim as he called to service our TV. But after this first acquaintance we had not seen him since, and often wondered what happened to him.

(At the time I noticed my hand phenomena, our cat Willy began to charge about the premises in a most active display. At the same time, Jane said that she thought she felt Seth stirring about, since all of us had talked about him constantly for some time now. I readied my pens and paper, just in case.

(I then showed Jim and Bill the two drawings of my visions of the night before; I did the drawings this afternoon. The drawing of the head, with the brimming eyes, struck Jim rather forcibly. In his quiet way he said the drawing was very disturbing to him, and mentioned this several times after I had put them away. Both Jim and Bill thought the other one, of the girl and dog, quite gruesome. As it happened, both drawings were rather successful; I felt I had done a good job of getting my memory of the visions down on paper.

Your guest this evening did not merely happen to come upon your acquaintance, though free will does operate, as I have maintained. Nevertheless Roarck, R-o-a-r-c-k, also has his subconscious memories, and he remembers the times when we were together.

These abilities have manifested themselves in various ways, and he has often taken upon himself tasks also of a sacrificial nature. In past lives he never enjoyed the fleshy nature with which you Joseph, and Ruburt, and Mark were so outlandishly endowed. He was in almost all cases an esthetic personality, four times a woman; two of these times a priestess, and once as a nun in the Middle Ages. The personality in many respects has been rigid, in that its purpose was so undeviatingly certain and severe that it allowed no room for levity or diversion.

Any material, to exist on your plane, must to some extent don the attire of your plane, and in the very entry to your plane it must be somewhat distorted. I must use phrases with which your minds are somewhat familiar. I must use Ruburt’s subconscious to some degree. If I did not take advantage of your own camouflage system, then you would not be able to understand the material at this time.

There must be no rigidity here. This is a living, vital and valid experiment. I suggest that all you take a brief break, and if you are in accord then I will continue for a short time. However, I want to make it plain that we are certainly not setting up a new dogma. By all means take your break.

Ruburt was quite correct. I found both of your attitudes earlier this evening to be extremely smug. You find it easy to blame others for not having the knowledge that you have thus far obtained, when you forget that I had much to do with choosing who would receive the knowledge. The situation and the time and the growth of your own abilities had something to do with this. While I am certainly not one given to humility, nevertheless your smugness is truly astronomical.

I have said the universe, that is the inner universe, does expand, but does not expand in space. For Roarck’s benefit, ideas, theories, plans, capabilities expand, but do not take up more space. And so does the universe expand, but space is merely a camouflage, useful to you for a time, constructed through the use of mental enzymes, subconsciously and only for a brief span.

Hypnosis is at best a poor tool. A light trance state, self induced, can yield excellent results in a subject who is trained along these lines. Later we will go into other experiments. As I have said, so-called space travel will be mainly divorced from vehicles, and the use of psychological time is the very first step in this direction.

The barriers are yours. The barriers are camouflage. It is ridiculous to develop camouflage vehicles to deal with camouflage space, when all that is necessary is that you realize that camouflage is camouflage. Therefore the barrier disappears. We will have much more to say along these lines. When you realize that time as you know it does not exist, then vehicles become unnecessary.

Since this is an unscheduled session I will not keep you, but I am extremely pleased, both because Mark finally made it to a session the other night, finally after knowing about the sessions for months, and also that Roarck has finally been drawn here. As a footnote, Roarck, you came too early the first time. I was not ready yet.

(Here, Jane laughed and pointed repeatedly at Jim Beckett. At the same time, I felt my familiar sensation, the thrilling tingling feeling of sound, begin to build up in my legs. It never became prominent, yet lingered for a few minutes.)

Here we have Roarck’s overall entity, laughing with mirth but also with compassion, for while the entity enjoys all that is, the personalities have often turned their backs upon very much, in order to pursue esthetic purpose. At another time we will go into this more deeply, but Roarck recognized the picture, and subconsciously saw himself. In many ways he and Mark have opposing personalities, and yet basically the entities are similar to some startling degree.

(Since my hand phenomena had disappeared by now, I was curious to check the measurements of my fingers now against those Bill had made earlier. The index finger of my right hand checked out at approximately the same circumference– 2 ”. My second finger, wherein I had been most strongly aware of the feeling of enlargement, had measured 2 ” at the time; its circumference now checked out at 2 ”, for a shrinkage of th of an inch.

(At 8:30 PM Jane and I tried psychological time, before the session which was due at 9 PM. Jane lay on the couch in the living room, I used the bed in the room next to my studio. It was very quiet and peaceful, and just about dark outside.

(I lay without concentrating upon anything in particular; I told myself I felt light and relaxed. Because I was using the word light for the first time in these experiments, [with a rather ill-defined idea of levitation in mind, after Jane’s attempts], I also told myself I was not afraid. I repeated these few words a few times, but do not believe I put myself in any kind of a trance, although at the time I took the precaution of reminding myself I could snap out of it any time I wanted to.

(For some time, trying to maintain a natural, pleasant waiting state, I had no results. Then an experience came. And again, while it had definite duration, it was still over with before I consciously understood what had taken place. This is just as I experienced the two visions of April 23, 1964, described on page 39.

(This time, I found myself standing in the doorway of an office building in New York City. I do not know what floor it was on, except that it was at least several floors up. It was not an office I had ever been in, yet was next door to an office I used to visit occasionally when Jane and I lived in Tenafly, NJ, and I was free-lancing as an artist in NYC. The building could be the Carnegie Hall office building, or one very close to Carnegie Hall, on 57th St. I do not recall the street number. The publisher I worked for occasionally was Charles Biro, the time was around 1955. I do not know whether he is still located there, or what has happened to him, not having seen him since.

(The entrance to Charles Biro’s offices was at the end of a hallway, as I remember, and the door to the anonymous office I visited tonight is next door to it. Tonight, I stood inside this open office door. To my left was a narrow window of vertical design, with either an aluminum or stainless steel frame. Looking out of this window, which was perhaps only two feet wide, I could see a shining aluminum or steel guardrail, and that even if a person managed to jump or fall out of this window, the safety of a stone parapet lay perhaps ten feet below. The time was daylight.