“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(No session was expected for tonight. Bill and Peggy Gallagher visited us unexpectedly at about 8:30 PM. The four of us decided to try a sitting like we had on Friday evening, August 20,1965. That didn’t develop into a session; Seth did’t speak. I have separate notes on it, showing how Jane expressed voice contact with an entity professing to be a female Gallagher. The details given by the entity were however not overtly familiar to Bill or Peggy. After the sitting we concluded that although something had taken place, the information was probably garbled.

(To begin tonight, the four of us sat at our small coffee table, holding hands. The room was lit by a candle within three feet of us on another table, and by reflected light from the kitchen on one side of the living room, and from the bedroom on the other side. Jane began speaking, asking if anyone was present. I had hesitated to speak, because on a previous occasion while trying this procedure I had inadvertently brought in Seth. See the 129th session, witnessed by Judy and Lee Wright.

(This time however Jane brought Seth in herself. We had clustered around the coffee table for perhaps five or six minutes when Seth came through. We broke our handclasps and relaxed for an informal exchange that lasted until 1:23 AM, with rather frequent breaks.

(Jane’s eyes opened perhaps ten minutes after she began to speak, and remained open for most of the session thereafter. She smoked, looked about at us, etc. Her eyes were very dark, without highlights. None of us saw any indication of feature change, nor did Seth tell us to be alert for such. Seth’s manner was quite energetic, the voice on the strong side but not really loud. Twice in a frisky mood, the voice climbed very briefly in volume; both times this happened near the end of the session.

(I made no attempt to take notes, nor did Peggy. What follows is my reconstruction from memory, made immediately after the session ended. I kept my notebook beside our bed also, and whenever I thought of something to add I did so, up until noon of the next day. Jane then read the notes and suggested any corrections she happened to remember. Peggy and Bill did most of the talking during the session. They are reading the early sessions now, and so what developed was a rather condensed review of some of the main tenets of the material, for their benefit.

(There were a few new bits and pieces of information throughout the session. One is to the effect that although Seth’s contact with Jane and me is his first venture into education on our plane, [which he had told us many sessions ago], he is also in contact with other groups on other planes. These other groups are not physical in our terms. Seth said that these other groups also have their wrongs, as we have ours. Killing is not one of them however, nor are wars.

(Bill’s mother, who was also an arthritic cripple like Jane’s mother, was a very aggressive personality, a masculine one, who developed arthritis in order to lose her mobility and thus avoid harming Bill’s father and the children. She felt a growing rage and aggressiveness she could not control. Seth said association worked here, in that Jane could perceive this data because her own mother has arthritis. Bill’s mother was very fond of flowers.

(Bill’s mother was fascinated by the relationships of numbers, Seth said, and the color blue. After the session Bill revealed that his mother had been a bookkeeper, which Jane and I did not know previously. Peggy recalled that Bill’s mother had been buried in a blue dress, which upset Bill’s father very much; and that Bill’s mother had many blue dresses in her wardrobe.

(Seth slipped in some personal material on Walter Zeh before “Ruburt catches me in the act.” He prefaced this by saying that we were all friends here tonight, presumably I suppose if the information was considered to be personal. Just before this he had mentioned again the similarity between Jane’s mother and Bill’s mother. Now he said that Walter Zeh had also been an invalid in a previous life, and a female. For reasons he didn’t go into now, Jane owed Walter Zeh a debt, which she has paid in full. Jane had been attracted to him also in an attempt to make up to him, because she hadn’t been able to make up to her invalid mother. In his previous life Walter Zeh had been crippled because of an accident.

(Also it was necessary that this episode in Jane’s life take place before I came along, and be gotten out of the way and done with. It had to be done first.

(Seth told Bill that a summer Sunday in 1946 is very important to him subconsciously. It involved Bill’s father William [Jane hadn’t known the name of Bill’s father], and an older man with brown hair whom Bill looked upon as being in a position of authority. There was some kind of disagreement as to Bill’s choice of a career [Bill had left the Navy not long before], an argument with Bill’s father; ever after that Bill didn’t get along with his father. Bill did not follow his father’s suggestions, I believe.

(Walter Zeh is a fragment personality, and a disturbed one. Because he had been an invalid in a past life, he tried to slow down Jane’s development in this life to a crawl. Yet Walter has learned much and is doing very well.

(A Freudian slip that Jane made in reference to her own mother in the past tense, “was,” whereas Seth wanted Jane to say “is,” was duly noted. Jane, he said, would be perfectly happy never to see her mother again.

(Right after the session began, Seth showed how Jane’s personal subconscious memories had, during the sitting with the Gallaghers, on August 20, distorted the material we received. What actually happened was that Jane’s maternal grandmother tried to get through, but Jane wanted to get Bill’s mother, and so named the entity speaking as a Gallagher. Seth mentioned that Jane’s own memories of the shredded-wheat incident should have told her what had happened. Also, Jane confused the corner grocery in her neighborhood with the grocery in Bill’s neighborhood, which was located in the middle of a block. Much, Seth said, Jane had picked up telepathically from Bill. Bill had looked up to the man running the grocery store in his neighborhood.

(I told Seth I hadn’t felt like going out dancing tonight because of the windy weather, and that I thought Jane would be disappointed. I had wished some company would drop in. This was just before darkness fell. As soon as the Gallaghers entered, they told us they had thought about us while eating dinner in Ithaca, NY, some 30-odd miles away, and had decided to stop by just in case we were home, even though it was Saturday evening. Seth said there had been telepathic communication between us, and as near as we could calculate we had been thinking about each other at roughly the same time.

(Just before the Gallaghers left, Seth/Jane’s voice began to grow very loud just for a sentence or two. We all clapped our hands over our ears, and Seth had mercy on us. The voice was somewhat unusual, Seth told us; he himself was not interested greatly in physical effects or proofs, but realized they might be necessary to us, or scientists. He was interested, he said, in effects like the voice, or Jane’s facial changes. There was much that he and Ruburt could do; there was also much they could not do. It depended upon Jane’s confidence to a great extent.

(As Bill opened the hall door, Jane, standing beside him, came through as Seth, very loud, for a few words. But it was enough to make him shut the door quickly. When Seth then departed, usual good nights were said, the Gallaghers left and the session was over.

(End at 1:23 AM. Jane felt fine in spite of the length of the session. Indeed, it was she who initiated it during our casual conversation, after the Gallaghers had been here for a while. Her eyes had remained open for the most part until the end, and she had been dissociated as usual.

(Jane’s maternal grandmother is on a midplane—at least one, and perhaps more, lives to come yet. [Or Bill’s mother, I can’t recall]. Later: we believe Bill’s mother is the one on the midplane.)