“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

But, as often happens when I try to second-guess Seth, I was really wrong. Our session, the 339th, started shortly afterward, and almost immediately I left my body, though I had little sensation of doing so. I just found myself hovering in midair, looking down on a particular neighborhood that was obviously someplace in Southern California. Back in the living room, Seth was describing what I was seeing, but I was only distantly aware of his voice. To me it sounded far less distinct than a very poor long-distance telephone call.

We really never know what is going to happen in a session, and one night Seth really surprised us. That night Phil turned up, unannounced as always. He told us he’d received a raise. With a comic shrug he left the amount up in the air. When the session started, Seth promptly named the amount to the dollar, smiling broadly. Then Phil asked Seth if he knew anything about a voice that he’d heard in a local bar.

“The voice was male, was it not?” Seth asked.

“Was it your voice? It happened so quickly, I didn’t have time to think,” Phil said, grinning. As Seth, I nodded humorously.

During our first break, Phil explained: A month earlier he’d been speaking to a young woman in a local bar, when he heard a clear, loud, male voice say, “No, no,” very emphatically. It seemed to come from within Phil’s head. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before, and he was so startled that he muttered a quick excuse to the woman and left the bar.

Rob and I didn’t know what to make of the affair. It certainly seemed to give some kind of evidence for Seth’s independent nature, unless Phil hallucinated the voice and Seth took advantage of the fact and claimed it as his own. If so (and I doubt it), then Seth certainly had information about the woman and the affair that Phil didn’t have.

One day I met Mrs. Brian, a former student who dropped out of class due to illness, who told me she had read a newspaper article about this present book that appeared in the local paper. It contained a few excerpts of the Seth Material, and a reproduction of Rob’s painting of Seth. Mrs. Brian had a terrific headache while reading the article; suddenly she thought she felt Seth’s presence. An inner voice, presumably Seth’s, told her that she had been feeling sorry for herself, that she must stop brooding over her health at once, get up, and go out for a walk. If so, she would improve at once.