“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In early February, Rob wrote to Dr. Ian Stevenson, who was connected with the Department of Neurology and Psychology at the University of Virginia. Dr. Stevenson was interested in reincarnation, and we had just read about his work. Rob also sent him copies of a few sessions, including some of the information we had been given about our own past lives. According to this, we lived several existences in the very distant past, including one in Denmark three centuries ago when Rob and I were father and son and Seth a mutual friend. Our last lives were in Boston in the nineteenth century.

Later elaborations on the above statement gave us a pretty fair idea of what inner processes go on so that Seth and I can make contact. This involves the construction of a “psychological bridge” that will be explained later in this book. At this point I’d been speaking as Seth for about forty minutes, and he recommended a rest period, saying: “Sometime between now and twenty-five years of laying your doubts at rest, I would like to go into some other matters that I have been trying to tackle for several sessions. But take your rest, pussies.”

For a while I think I spent half the time trying to psychoanalyze Seth and the other half trying to analyze myself. Caution is one thing, but sometimes I went overboard. Even so, Seth said that my strong ego was an asset to our work when I didn’t overdo it, since it kept my whole personality on an even keel and allowed me the psychological strength to handle and develop my abilities.

In other words, I used to watch Seth like a hawk, particularly during the first year or so, but he always behaved intelligently, with dignity and humor. As soon as I began judging him by his actions and his effect on us, I dropped this habit. He won my trust. He has given us excellent, psychologically sound advice, but he never tried to give us orders.

So many developments occurred in the following months that it is difficult to cover them all. We were both to have our first out-of-body experiences, or “astral projections.” Our experiments in what Seth calls “Psychological Time” helped us develop our own psychic abilities. The quality and scope of the Seth Material constantly grew, and we were to make some contacts with others in the field of parapsychology. We were shortly to discover that Seth was indeed clairvoyant, and that my own training as a medium had only begun.