“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The year 1963 had been a poor one for us, though. Rob had severe back trouble, and hardly felt well enough to paint when he came home from work. I was having difficulties settling on another book idea. Our old pet dog, Mischa, had died. Perhaps these circumstances made me more aware than usual of our human vulnerability, but certainly many people have had difficult years with no resulting emergence of psychic phenomena. Perhaps, all unknowing, I had reached a crisis and my psychic abilities awoke as the result of inner need.

It was a lovely autumn evening. After supper I sat down at my old table in the living room, as I always did, to work on my poetry. Rob was painting in the back studio, three rooms away. I took out my pen and paper and settled down with my ninth or tenth cup of coffee for the day, and my cigarettes. Willie, our cat, dozed on the blue rug.

What happened next was like a “trip” without drugs. If someone had slipped me an LSD cube on the sly, the experience couldn’t have been more bizarre. Between one normal minute and the next, a fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if my skull were some sort of receiving station, turned up to unbearable volume. Not only ideas came through this channel, but sensations, intensified and pulsating. I was tuned in, turned on—whatever you want to call it—connected to some incredible sorce of energy. I didn’t even have time to call out to Rob.

Our curiosity was aroused, to say the least. At a newsstand we noticed a book on ESP. The words “Clairvoyant Dreams” popped up from the cover, and we bought it. About this time I was also looking for a new book idea, and Rob made the suggestion that was to lead us further and further away from the way of life we’d always known.

Rob picked up the book and said jokingly, “Why don’t you do a do-it-yourself book on ESP?”

“I know,” Rob said. “But you’re interested in dreams, certainly after those two particular ones you had. And what do you call that experience you had last month? Besides, the books we’ve seen have dealt only with well-known mediums. But what about ordinary people? What if everyone has those abilities?” I stared at him. He’d turned quite serious. “Couldn’t you work out a series of experiments and try them out? Use yourself as a guinea pig.”

Put that way, Rob’s idea made sense. I could investigate a subject that now intrigued me, and do a book at the same time.

Somewhat to my surprise he answered quickly, and he was quite enthusiastic. What he wanted was three or four sample chapters. Rob and I were delighted, but somewhat appalled too, as we looked over the chapter headings I’d listed for the book: “A Do-It-Yourself Séance,” “Telepathy, Fact or Fiction?”, “How to Work the Ouija.”

“Well, get to it,” Rob said, laughing.

“You and your suggestions,” I countered. By now I was really having second thoughts. We’d never been to a medium. We’d never had a telepathic experience in our lives, never even seen a Ouija board. On the other hand, I thought, what did I have to lose? (It wasn’t until much later that I remembered that another of Rob’s suggestions had launched me into fiction in the first place.)

Here are a few examples. Rob asked the questions. The pointer spelled out the answers.

The next time we tried a few days later, Frank Withers said that he had been a soldier in Turkey during one life, and insisted (through the board) that he had known Rob and me in a city called Triev, in Denmark, in still another life. Dates and locations were given, though it was made clear that Triev no longer exists.

Rob asked the questions, then we paused while he wrote out the answers the pointer spelled. Frank Withers had given simple one- or two-word responses in previous sessions. Now the answers became longer, and their character seemed to change. The atmosphere of the room was somehow different.

“Do you have a message for us?” Rob asked.

From the first few messages, Frank Withers had insisted upon the validity of reincarnation, so Rob said, “What do you think of your various reincarnations?”

“Is all of this Jane’s subconscious talking?” Rob asked.

“Maybe it’s your subconscious,” I said to Rob, but he was already asking another question:

Rob and I shrugged at each other: this was really wild, and the pointer was speeding faster and faster. Rob waited a moment, then asked, “What would you prefer to be called?”

“But we still need some kind of name to use in talking to you,” Rob said.

“Can you tell us more?” Rob asked. “If you call me Joseph, what do you call Jane?”

We looked at each other again. I grimaced. “Would you clear that up a bit?” Rob said.

There was a pause. We didn’t know what to ask or how to proceed. Finally Rob said, “Could you tell me why I had all that back trouble earlier this year?

These are only a few excerpts from that first session with Seth. (A few weeks later, though, Rob had some more difficulty with his back and went to a chiropractor who told him that his first vertebra was out of alignment.) The session lasted until after midnight, and after that we sat up talking about it.

“Maybe,” Rob said, then added with a grin, “Maybe he actually is someone who survived death.”

“What did you say, Ruburt?” Rob asked. I could have crowned him.

The next session started like the others. I was working afternoons at an art gallery, and after the dishes were done and Rob was through with painting for the day, we got out the board.

“Why is Jane rather reserved about our contacts with you?” Rob asked, when we were set up. “I can tell she isn’t too enthusiastic.”

“But why is this cause for concern?” Rob asked, with, I thought at the time, a marvelously faked innocence.

“Why?” Rob persisted.

In the meantime we had told a friend of ours, Bill Macdonell, what we were doing. Bill in turn had told us about an apparition he’d seen a few years earlier when he was an art student. He’d never mentioned such a thing before. Now Rob asked what Bill had seen.

I hardly heard Rob ask the question. Through the whole session I’d been hearing the words in my head before they were spelled, and I’d felt the impulse to speak them. Now the impulse grew stronger and I grew more determined to fight it. Yet I was terribly curious. And what could happen, after all? I didn’t know—and this made me even more curious.

The pointer began to spell out the answer to Rob’s question.

Suddenly the words stopped. I stared at Rob.

“Seth, would you verify Jane’s reception of the above message?” Rob asked.

I relaxed a little; the pointer was taking over the messages again. But Rob asked another question.

Once more the words just stopped. This time I was determined not to let the same thing happen again until I had time to think it over, and I told Rob. Still we agreed to check with the board. “Was Jane’s answer right, Seth?” Rob asked.

“I’m glad somebody thinks so,” I said to Rob, but now that things were safely back with the board, my curiosity was at me again. I told Rob to ask if one of us alone could work the pointer, and the pointer suggested that we try. Rob put his hands on the pointer and asked a question, but it barely moved.

Then we both put our hands back on it. “What did you think of that, Seth?” Rob asked.

“Hmm,” Rob said. We laughed and finally ended the session.

I don’t know what Rob would have thought then if he’d realized what Seth meant by “internal visual data,” though; and writing this now I just remembered that he was pretty surprised when his first few internal visions appeared with extraordinary vividness. I’ll describe these later. That night, of course, we were primarily concerned with my speaking experience. If I’d known how this was to be expanded in the next session, I probably would have been a nervous wreck.