“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It was as if the physical world were really tissue-paper thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality, and I was suddenly flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound. My body sat at the table, my hands furiously scribbling down the words and ideas that flashed through my head. Yet I seemed to be somewhere else, at the same time, traveling through things. I went plummeting through a leaf, to find a whole universe open up; and then out again, drawn into new perspectives.

The paperback we’d just purchased was on the coffee table between us as we sat talking. “I’ve got outlines for three novels, and none of them really please me,” I said.

“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.)

So we began. We settled on the Ouija board first, because it seemed the least complicated of our various experiments. Our landlady found a board in the attic and we borrowed it. Actually both of us were a little embarrassed the first few times we tried the board. My attitude was, “Well, let’s get this out of the way so we can really get down to the things we’re interested in, like telepathy and clairvoyance.” No wonder our first attempts were failures.

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?”

Seth had a purpose, all right: to deliver the material he’s been giving us twice a week, now, like clockwork for the past five years. But we didn’t know that then. While this was already our fourth session at the board, it was really our first Seth session.

The pointer paused. I felt as if I were standing, shivering, on the top of a high diving board, trying to make myself jump while all kinds of people were waiting impatiently behind me. Actually it was the words that pushed at me—they seemed to rush through my mind. In some crazy fashion I felt as if they’d back up, piles of nouns and verbs in my head until they closed everything else off if I didn’t speak them. And without really knowing how or why, I opened up my mouth and let them out. For the first time I began to speak for Seth, continuing the sentences the board had spelled out only a moment before.