“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon Jane and I met a friend of John Bradley’s, Mrs. Lorraine Shafer, Horseheads, NY. She borrowed a copy of the first 23 sessions.

(Jane spoke for the session while sitting down and with her eyes closed. Her voice was somewhat heavier throughout, her rate of delivery somewhat faster than usual.)

(Break at 9:30. Jane was not as deeply dissociated as she has been recently. She knew the gist of what she had said. Looking back at the Father Trainor episode, she said she was somewhat frightened in retrospect, and would not conduct such a lengthy experiment again.

(A copy of Jane’s account of the Father Trainor affair will be found at the end of this session. This took place on February 11, Thursday, and parts of it are recorded. A shorter repetition, also recorded, was given for Judy and Lee Wright on the evening of February 12, Friday. It was this occasion to which I objected.

(It will be noted that in the 12th session, January 2,1964, Seth, without being asked by us, stated that he “knows” Jane’s old friend, Father Trainor. Father Trainor was an Irish Catholic priest who visited Jane and her ill mother regularly, for years, during Jane’s grade and high school days. He has been dead for some time. Jane has a photograph of him.

(Jane resumed in the same manner at 9:39.)

(Break at 10:05. Jane’s eyes opened slowly. She reported that she was much more dissociated than during her first delivery. She resumed in the same rather heavy voice at 10:16.)

(Jane now took a rather long pause.)

(While visiting us on a recent weekday evening, Bill Macdonnel ruptured a blood vessel in his nose. It bled to such an extent that after half an hour we called the emergency room at one of the local hospitals. Bill lost much blood and became quite ill. Just as the hospital instructed us to take him there, the bleeding stopped. Being afraid to move very much Bill spent the night with us. He was better in the morning, although the bleeding resumed briefly. It developed that Bill has been troubled by this ailment since childhood. Jane and I did not know about it, however, and this was his first such seizure in over a year.)

(End at 10:37. Jane was well dissociated. Once in a while Jane and I have discussed extra sessions, but usually we do not have the time, particularly when other experiments like the one involving Father Trainor crop up. Occasionally we would like a session dealing with some specific problem, and may try this approach. Also one involving questions and answers.)

(Notes from Jane’s version of the Father Trainor experiment of February 11, 1965.

(Something did take place. The medium allowing others to speak through her is the best guess I can make at this time. It seems reasonable, if Jane’s abilities are growing, as the material suggests.

(As a check I suggested later that Jane try reading a different poem, one not read by Father Trainor, to see if she could summon this powerful new voice at will. I wanted to see if something Jane had no emotional involvement with, via memory, could also be used to summon voice changes. Nothing happened. To begin with Jane could not consciously summon nearly the volume of voice, and within a few lines she was so hoarse she had to rest. She said Father Trainor always read the Lepanto and the Elegy on his Sunday visits, and that she could not remember his reading anything else.

(The volume and male inflection Jane achieved during her various readings was quite amazing. I noticed that toward the end of each verse of the Lepanto she would reach a crescendo of volume and emotion that was indeed thrilling. For brief periods her voice would sound very alien. For other periods, during what seemed to be letdowns, I would know the voice was hers. But still it would be much stronger and lower in timbre than her natural voice.

(It might be added that during the whole day’s experimentation Jane did not suffer from any voice fatigue, nor did she have any aftereffects the next day. She bore up as well as when she was conducting three-hour Seth sessions, although today’s experiment lasted something like five or six hours. I was afraid that she would overdo it however.)