“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“Not knowing just how to go about having a séance, we plugged in a small red electric Christmas candle. Our walls are white, so we could see fairly well once our eyes were adjusted.

“He began by telling us to watch Jane’s thumb. The tip of it began to glow. It seemed to be an internal suffusing of the flesh with a cold white light. There was no radiant effect, merely the changing color of the flesh itself. Since the hand was in shadow, there was no mistaking the change.

“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?’

“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.

“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.

“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.

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.