“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This session is a summary of proceedings, from notes made immediately after. As Seth mentioned in the last session, Jane decided this evening to try to contact a survival personality as a medium would ordinarily for interested observers or relatives.

(I believe Jane set the stage for the events that followed, as she herself spoke aloud, and that by the time I began to speak things were well under way even if they were not obvious. Jane and I wanted Seth’s assistance in contacting Blanche, without Seth himself speaking, for we thought this would make the session too much like the regular sessions. Jane had repeatedly asked Seth for assistance, and I began by doing the same.

(Jane’s head did not remain still however, but began to tip to one side at times; then she would right it again while seemingly making efforts to speak. She said the left hand movements were weird to her, and felt subjectively “like a dead hand.” As though it were necessary almost for Blanche to go through the experience of being ill once again in order to make contact through Jane, and to even approach the death experience itself. At no time, Jane said, did she “see” Blanche, or feel disembodied herself; yet she felt at the same time that contact had been made. If play acting was involved, Jane said later, it was on a completely subconscious level where she would possess no egotistical knowledge that such was transpiring.

(The session, Jane said, verged often on the unpleasant, as if Blanche had to go through her own last memories first in order to make contact, and we wondered whether a survival personality would want to do this very often. As I continued speaking, trying to help Jane get an emotional feeling of making contact without being engulfed by any strong or unpleasant emotion that Blanche might be reexperiencing, Jane began to whimper in a subdued way. I thought this reinforced the fact of contact, yet at the same time reassured Jane, by name, that she could do very well, and that Seth and I were with her as protectors.

(Jane said later that this worked well, and evidently helped her across several rough spots—the feeling or urge to cry passed after a few moments. Jane now seemed to be in a deeper trance, and began to try to speak. Her voice was quite low and I often asked her to repeat herself. She would first whisper or mouth what she wanted to say, then with quite an apparent effort would finally manage to get audible, understandable data through at my urging. “This is Blanche,” was one of the first things she said, after I had deliberately called her Jane for reassurance, while thinking she had probably made contact with Blanche, and was somewhat unpleasantly involved in a sickroom episode.

(At no time was Jane aware of Seth as a personality, and neither of us saw any signs of him or from him. One of my concerns when Jane asked me to speak to Seth at the beginning of the session, was whether my speaking would bring on a regular Seth session, but this didn’t develop; and the method gave us both confidence for like experiments in the future. Jane said my speaking was a great help for her, and did act as a protective device. My own idea was for Jane to make emotional or feeling contact with Blanche, without whatever emotions she encountered becoming too intrusive and so interfering with any data we might get.