“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“The glow spread up the length of the thumb to the mound of flesh at its base, next to the palm. ‘Watch the mound,’ Seth said, with more than a little satisfaction. ‘See the color change and the shadows in the palm disappear? If you want a demonstration, then you shall have it, silly as it is … And now the wrist. See it thicken and turn white?’

“Slowly the hand regained normal shape. Jane still sat with her palm up. Now Seth really extended himself. The fingers began to elongate noticeably and to whiten. Then a second set of fingers began to rise up over Jane’s own fingers. Now it could have been easy enough for Jane to bend her own fingers into this position, but here the three of us now saw the second set rising up long and white. Moreover, this second set had the fingernails on top. Had they been Jane’s own fingers, the nails would have been on the undersides and invisible.

“ ‘Now the hand changes again,’ Seth said. ‘It becomes a stubby fat one. Frank Withers had a hand like that, just like that. Frank Withers was a fathead,’ he said, with great satisfaction, even though Frank was, according to Seth, a personality fragment of his own entity.

“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.

“Seth now had this cold inner light suffuse Jane’s wrist and palm to an even more remarkable degree. At the joining of hand and wrist, the flesh rose up in an egglike lump. The white crept up Jane’s arm to the sweater, and bled down her fingers, until all semblance of shadow was gone from the arm and palm. Then to end this part of the demonstration, Seth had Jane place her hands side by side on the table, so that we could plainly see the difference between the two. Gradually the hand returned to normal, and Seth instructed us to take a rest period.

“ ‘Now the three of you see your reflections clearly in the mirror, just as you should. Watch, for I’ll change Jane’s image and replace it with another,’ Seth said. And Jane’s image did begin to change. Her head dropped lower. At the same time, the shape of the skull changed, the hair grew shorter and fit about it much more closely. The shoulders of the mirror image hunched over, and grew more narrow. And then the head in the mirror tilted, and looked down, while Jane herself sat with her head erect, staring straight ahead into the mirror.

“It was also obvious that the mirror image sat several inches lower down than Jane herself sat. And now and then the mysterious head would dip down and then hang forward from the body.” End of Rob’s notes.

For nearly three hours I spoke for Seth, striding up and down the room, joking, pausing now and then for Rob to catch up with his notes, and delivering this monologue, using gestures and facial expressions, verbal expressions and inflections, entirely different from my own. I spoke steadily, without hesitation, breaking up serious philosophical material with jovial comments, much like a professor at a small seminar. The session so aroused our intellectual and intuitional curiosity that all thoughts of discontinuing went out the window.

“Consider a network of wires, a maze of interlocking wires endlessly constructed so that looking through them there would seem to be no beginning or end. Your plane could be likened to a small position between four very spindly wires, and my plane could be likened to the small position in the neighboring wires on the other side. Not only are we on different sides of the same wires, but we are at the same time above or below, according to your viewpoint. And if you consider the wires as forming cubes—this is for you, Joseph, with your love of images—then the cubes could also fit one within the other, without disturbing the inhabitants of either cube one iota. And these cubes are themselves within cubes, and I am speaking now only of the small particle of space taken up by your plane and mine.

“This is what I mean by fifth dimension. Now, remove the structure of the wires and cubes. Things behave as if the wires and cubes existed, but these were only constructions necessary even to those on my plane. … We construct images consistent with the senses we happen to have. We merely construct imaginary lines to walk upon.