“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.)

I quite understand Ruburt’s curiosity when Father Trainor’s voice did indeed come through, although far from perfectly. And it did represent another phase of Ruburt’s developing abilities. But these abilities must be trained. I do believe that Ruburt has learned an important lesson. As his abilities do develop, it is even more important that he take walks, and that some frequency in daily contact with others is maintained.

(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.)

(I stood up and began to read. The sudden volume and depth and timbre of my voice was instantly apparent, and startled me. I read all of the Lepanto and part of the Elegy in this manner. My voice boomed—I sounded more like Father Trainor than like myself. The volume of my voice was really tremendous.

(When I finished this I kept wondering about it. Why hadn’t I thought to record it? What was the change in my voice? Had I imagined or elaborated on perhaps just a small change? I tried to do it over, on tape. The reading this time was not as striking as the first time, but still there was certainly something definitely going on.

(After lunch I decided to try again. At lunch I played the tape for Rob, then while posing for him I suggested to myself that I would go into a trance as soon as I began to read, and that Father Trainor would indeed use his voice to speak through me, if he was available. I then started all over again with the readings. Except, for what reason I do not know, I turned the recorder on but forgot to depress the “record” button.

(This performance was as good as the first one. I felt carried away by the voice, almost outside of myself, very light and disconnected from this voice. But I do recall that the book itself, which I held as I paced, was heavy. I grew cold and tingled as I read. My hands perspired quite a bit, perhaps from holding the book. Rob came out of his studio to listen to me. When I discovered that I had recorded nothing this time I felt cheated, because to me this reading had been most unusual.

(I was so angry that I did the whole thing over again. Lepanto is a four-page poem. This time the performance was about like the second one, already recorded. Perhaps if I feel subjectively right about doing it again, I may try it tonight. I don’t know where the volume comes from, the deep manlike tones. Perhaps it is what actors call merely projection, breathing from the diaphragm. I wasn’t conscious of breathing any differently than usual, but if this was a subconscious production that wouldn’t make any difference. But where would the male aspect enter, unless it be a woman’s attempt to mimic as best she could the voice of a man she had admired?

(Rob suggested another possibility: that as a medium I am starting to learn to let others in contact with me speak out. Perhaps, because I knew Father Trainor, I let his voice come through as a starter.

(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.

(This voice was not the Seth voice by any means. Even at its strongest Seth’s voice is a dry and intellectual one. The Father Trainor voice was very emotional by contrast. I do not believe that the Father Trainor voice at its best exceeded Seth at his best, and vice versa.

(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.)