“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“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.

I knew Rob was right, though: Some self-protection is necessary on my part. Besides the mother-in-law episode, there had been a few other upsetting ones involving emotional situations I’d “picked up” from living people. In any case, when I can get such excellent material from Seth, it seems that my primary responsibility lies in that direction. All of these feelings were in the back of my mind that night, when Jim and Ann came.

Another similar case, involving the death of a child, concerned a woman who attended a few of my classes. Her fifteen-year-old adopted son had drowned a few months earlier. Seth said in a session that the boy had been a sailor in several past lives and still regarded death by water as preferable to dying on land. The boy had been related to his foster mother in another life, and also returned to help her gain needed inner development. He died early so that his death would make her question, and search for answers. She had been running from medium to medium, trying to contact the boy. In no uncertain terms, Seth told her to stop this practice and to work for inner development instead.

He recommended that Sally’s limbs be rubbed with peanut oil, and that iron be added to her diet. He emphasized that she would be happier in another room and said: “I believe you have a fairly small sunny parlor. This room has beneficial connotations for her. Let her be moved there.” In passing he spoke of several episodes in Sally’s present life, some that Jon corroborated in his next letter, and one in particular that he did not know about until Seth mentioned it. Seth said, for example, that she had worked in a five-and-dime store with a girl friend, and that a visit from this friend would be helpful. Jon didn’t know that Sally had worked in such a place, but her mother remembered.

Seth went on to say that in her next life, Sally was reborn as a woman of some artistic merit in a very successful existence, also in Italy. She was the mother of two sons. “Here the personality was born only fifty miles away, and as the wife of a wealthy landowner, she often drove through the very land where the small house [of her former life] still stood with its farm. This in a town badly bombed in the Second World War.”