“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“We began by sitting at a small table in our living room. We covered the table with a piece of dark material. The kitchen opens off the living room, so we closed the blinds in both rooms and pulled the curtains over them.

“Jane’s wrist did thicken. She sat with the wrist of her left hand pressed to the tabletop. She wore a black sweater with the sleeves half pushed up and the cold white light spread up over the thickening wrist, up her forearm, to the sweater.

“Then the hand began to change its general proportions and resembled a pawlike shape. I had the eerie feeling of an animal’s forepaw. Jane’s fingers, normally long and graceful, had shrunken to stubby appendages, or so it appeared. The glow suffused the palm, eliminating the shadows normally to be seen there, so that it did not seem that the fingers were merely folded over.

“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 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.

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.

But as soon as the séance was over, I was appalled. Instead of being encouraged by Seth’s part in the events, we were upset. We all knew what we had seen. Rob had even touched the hand at one time, and Seth had given us many occasions to check effects as they occurred. We couldn’t accept the evidence of our senses, nor could we really deny such obvious evidence. Though we were trying the experiment for the book, we thought that seances were kooky, somehow unrespectable. We didn’t want Seth involved, and specifically had made a point of not asking for him.

The first session with Frank Withers had been held on December 2, 1963. In the fourteenth session, January 8, I was ready to speak for Seth, deep masculinelike tones and all. We had traveled some way in little over a month. Beyond doubt those thirty-odd days were filled with the most intense psychological activity, excitement, and speculation that we had ever encountered. It would be at least three years and after my book appeared before we even began to understand what had happened.