“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“ ‘For a first attempt, I’m doing beautifully,’ Seth said. ‘What do you think of that? Take a good look.’ For some minutes we studied the effect before us. To me the extra fingers bent so grotesquely looked waxen, almost wet, as though freshly molded. Jane did not appear to be frightened. Then, gradually, the extra set of fingers disappeared.

“The hand did become stubby and fat for a moment. Then it resumed the pawlike shape. ‘Now,’ Seth said to me, ‘very carefully reach out and touch the hand. I want you to touch it, so that you can feel what it is like.’ Gingerly, I touched my fingertips to Jane’s palm. The pawlike hand felt very cold, wet and clammy, and the skin had a bumpy feeling that I wasn’t used to in Jane’s hand.

“Jane said later that this shocked her more than anything else. I looked at her first beside me, then in the mirror. There was no doubt as to the difference between the two. I also saw a shadow suffuse the mirror image. At the same time I had the feeling that the face hung forward from the body. The mirror head seemed to grow smaller. I detected a faint glow about it as it hung in space, seemingly between the mirror reflection and the three of us.

When Seth took over, his confidence knocked all other ideas or doubts from my mind. Yet my eyes were open all the while. I could examine the differences between my hands, for example, and see the other set of fingers, and the white glow that ran up to the edge of my rolled-up sweater. I seemed to “click out” when Seth spoke, yet a tremendous sense of energy rushed through me as he did so. Except for the mirror image at the end, nothing bothered me.

Later work has convinced me that psychic phenomena do not simply appear because we want them to, or as the result of suggestion alone. Other, later effects happened in full light, in a few of my ESP classes, for example. The Seth apparition also appeared in full light. I’ve also known incidents since, when groups of highly suggestible people with little critical sense have gathered in dark rooms expecting all kinds of apparitions—and nothing happened at all.

For the first time Seth really “came through” as a definite other personality, laughing and joking. Rob just couldn’t believe that he was speaking to me, in any ordinary terms. But more than this, Seth’s long monologue on the nature of reality captivated and intrigued us. We had no idea that it was actually a highly simplified explanation, cleverly geared to our own level of understanding at the time. It made a tremendous impression on us nonetheless.

“So real are the wall constructions of your room that you would freeze in winter without them, yet there is no room and there are no walls. So, in a like manner, the wires that we constructed are real, though there are no wires. The walls of your room are transparent to me, though I am not sure I would perform, dear Joseph and Ruburt, for a party demonstration.

Rob laughed at this, and so did I when he read me the notes. We were fascinated by the monologue on the fifth dimension—which ran much longer, incidentally, than the excerpts given here. Seth’s personality impressed Rob to such an extent that he, at least, was convinced that Seth was a completely independent personality. He knows me so well, of course, in almost every mood, that he’s in an excellent position to judge the differences and similarities between my personality and Seth’s.