“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The first episode involved a couple I will call Jim and Ann Linden. Ann, a complete stranger, called me on the phone one morning. Since she dialed me directly, there was no indication that this was a long-distance call, and I thought she was calling from town, particularly since she mentioned having relatives in Elmira. She told me that her son, Peter, had died a few months ago at the age of three. She and her husband were distraught, she said, and a friend of theirs, Ray Van Over, a parapsychologist in New York, had suggested she call me.

I told Rob, and while he said that it was up to me, he wasn’t too happy. “Remember what happened last time you tried to contact someone’s deceased relative?” he said. “Anyway, let Seth handle it.”

“Uh huh,” I said, and the details of that last episode rushed into consciousness once more. It had been a bright sunny Saturday afternoon several months earlier. I was in jeans, housecleaning, when a student called. She had a particularly knotty problem and she wanted me to try to contact her deceased mother-in-law. The student had been to only a few classes, and her mother-in-law lived and died in Florida. I didn’t know her family at all.

I started to smile, though, thinking of it: According to Rob the can of Dutch Cleanser had really jumped when my fist came down on the table the first time, and the cleaning supplies next to my elbow had gone flying. It had hardly been an occult setting at that, with the sun shining full through the bay windows. My student was convinced that her mother-in-law had expressed herself through me, because I used her gestures and her language—including some pet phrases that were pretty purple.

“Seth just wasn’t around,” I said. “If he had been, he probably would have given me the information, and I wouldn’t have had to go through all that.”

“Too objective, I’m afraid. Sometimes it holds me back from using my abilities fully.”

That’s the last thing I remember saying as myself. The next moment Seth’s deep booming voice came rushing through me: “The boy was briefly with you for his own reasons. He was to enlighten you, and so he did. You have known him in past lives. At one time, he was his present father’s uncle.

I felt pretty humble when the whole thing was over. Jim and Ann were almost transformed, and before the session, I had been so dubious that I hesitated. (The thing is, when I consciously think in such a limited fashion, my intuitive inner self rises up and shows me that much more is involved than the ego. Actually I think that these abilities flow through us as the wind flows through the branches.) Ann wrote me a letter shortly after, telling me that she and Jim no longer felt the tremendous sorrow that had burdened them earlier.

More and more I have seen how reincarnation makes sense out of such apparently senseless tragedies, and provides an inner structure to situations that would otherwise seem chaotic and unjust. I was so pleased to be able to help Ann and Jim; and that session and others like it have helped me also by showing me the value of ideas that originally I could not accept. The same thing applies to Seth: I am literally amazed at his capacity to help others, at his psychological understanding, at all the abilities he draws upon and focuses in our sessions.

Here is how this process works in a specific instance. Again, a phone call was involved, this time from a man I’ll call Jon who called me from another part of the country, right after my first book was published two years ago. Jon and his wife were both in their early twenties. I’ll call his wife Sally. After coming down with multiple sclerosis, Sally had been given about a year to live, and Jon wanted to ask Seth if anything could be done for her.