“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It was just last week that Jon called again. Sally was in the hospital, after a bad attack during which her heart had stopped for a short time. Jon was torn between praying for her recovery and for her release by death, and he asked if we’d have a session on the matter.

I did promise to hold a Seth session for him, and later I was glad I did. Not only was the session a help to Jon, but it contains some excellent information on what can go on while a person is supposedly unconscious, in coma, and what we experience just before and after death.

Again, at the time of the session Sally was in deep coma. She hadn’t been able to speak for over a year. First Seth gave a page or so of impressions, names, initials, events, and so forth, that he said he “derived from a certain portion of the girl’s consciousness—disjointed memories, thoughts, and ideas.

A few days after this session we were visited by a retired minister and his wife. Rev. Lowe, as I’ll call him, publishes a national newsletter which discusses the psychic elements of Christianity. We had been corresponding for a few years, but had not met. I told him about Jon’s session, and he was very interested in what Seth had to say about Sally’s experience while in coma.

I had no idea whether or not Seth would come through that night. In the beginning, I’d jokingly introduced the minister as a rock drummer, to put both him and the class at ease. Someone commented that the presence of a minister must have quieted everyone down, since no one was saying much.

Suddenly Seth came through, saying: “And I thought you were on your good behavior because I was here! I will have to learn to be a reverend rock drummer, and I will keep the beat with you.” After this he spoke to various class members, and then invited Rev. Lowe to ask whatever questions came to his mind.

Rev. Lowe asked other questions but no more relating to the subject at hand. He and Seth seemed to get along very well. Later, in a break, I received several impressions of a past life of Mrs. Lowe’s. While a general discussion was going on, I “saw” her near a riding academy in fourteenth-century France; and then I saw her and Rev. Lowe as twins in Greece, when he was an orator and she a soldier. There were other details, but the interesting thing was that Mrs. Lowe told me afterward that she was really crazy about horses, and that Greece and France were the only countries in which she had any great interest.

The girls were all intelligent, bright, alert—and wary. They weren’t about to be taken in by any mumbo jumbo. At the same time they were intensely interested in Seth’s ideas that consciousness can be expanded safely and without drugs, using his methods. One girl, Lydia, was the most vocal of the group in her arguments against reincarnation.

“You will reincarnate whether or not you believe that you will,” Seth began, smiling. “It is much easier if your theories fit reality, but if they do not, then you do not change the nature of reincarnation one iota.” He went on to give Lydia a rather detailed description of a past life around the area of Bangor, Maine, in 1832, when she was a male. This was Lydia’s first Seth session and she sat wiggling nervously in her chair as Seth gave names, dates, and particular episodes of this past life.

When he was finished, she said, “Well, I don’t know what to say, but I’ll tell you this. The crazy thing is that I spent my childhood in Bangor, Maine, and when we moved to New York State I wouldn’t give New York as my home. I always felt that I belonged in Maine. And Seth said that—” She broke off, and read her notes. Then she said excitedly, “Seth said that a Miranda Charbeau from the French side of my family in that past life married into the Franklin Bacon family of Boston. Again, it’s crazy, it really is, because my family this time is connected with the Roger Bacon family from Boston.”

There was no time for more discussion though, because Seth now began to speak to Jean, the most psychically gifted of the group:

“She lived in Mesopotamia before it was known by that name. Here we find abilities shown, ignored, and misused through a succession of lives; a rather classic example of the ‘progress’ followed by many psychically endowed, but in poor control of their personalities and abilities.

“China and Egypt. Lives in various religious capacities, but without the necessary sense of responsibility; unfortunately taking advantage of the fortunes made available to the ruling classes through the ages. For this reason, the abilities have not come to fruition. Only in this present existence is there finally some understanding, and sense of responsibility. In the past the psychic abilities were used for the wrong purposes; therefore, they did not fully develop and the personality was at a standstill.

“There was death by fire on two occassions.” Following this statement Seth gave details from an Irish life of Jean’s in 1524. Then he went on to give the following data, which we found most interesting. I’ll give it exactly as we received it, though it was somewhat confusing in the beginning, since Seth just jumped into it.

“A small town twenty-five meters from Charterous—the nearest approximation here, Charterous or Charteris [Chartres?]. The last name then was Manupelt. Or Man Aupault. A. Curia. Some connection here with the first historical personality we have run across: a very distant connection to Joan of Arc, on the mystic’s father’s side, twice removed. And that name, approximately as given, in some records … in an old cathedral. The family name, the town, and the name of the cathedral are the same.”

When Seth was done, for a minute, Jean wouldn’t say a thing. Then she really blushed and told us that she’d always been terrified of fire, and that her nickname in high school had been Joan of Arc or The Witch.

But Seth wasn’t through. He gave reincarnational material for another student, Connie, and mentioned in particular a life in Denmark when she had died as a small boy of diphtheria. And that really did it! Connie surprised everyone, particularly the other college girls, by saying that since she was a small child she’d been frightened of getting diphtheria, and that she could never understand why.

So along with the reincarnational histories Seth had given each girl a point of information, highly significant, and unknown to anyone in the room except for the person for whom it was intended. And this bit of information tied in beautifully with some small unexplainable attitudes that had previously puzzled them. Suddenly they were quite interested in reincarnation, and as usual, their minds were trigger-fast. Now they wanted to know everything at once.

In fact, Seth gave three or four sessions in which he compared cases of “split” personalities to our reincarnation selves. He ended up by saying, “It is interesting that the personalities [in Three Faces of Eve] did alternate, and all were in existence at once, so to speak, even though only one was dominant at any given time. In the same way, so-called past personalities are present in you now but not dominant.”

Doris was having all kinds of problems. For one thing, she kept falling head over heels in love with men who didn’t want marriage under any circumstances. In these relationships she was the aggressor. The men in each case were men who did not date, were overly attached to their parents, or who for some reason or other did not have ordinary relationships with women. Doris was smart enough to see this, but each time she was certain that there was something about the new man that made him more eligible—or at least more liable to accept her advances. In the meantime she was dreadfully lonely, for she would refuse dates with “ordinary” men, since they seemed so inferior compared to the new idol.

Finally after the breakup of one such episode, she asked for a Seth session. She knows both of us well, so I was quite astonished at her behavior before the session. She was so uptight that I found it difficult to go into trance. She just sat there, really white-faced, unsmiling, looking quite terrified.

From what Rob said later, Doris sat there red-faced and somewhat embarrassed. Our tape recorder was on. Seth went on citing examples from Doris’ early life of which Rob and I knew nothing. The entire session took up nine pages of single-typed copy, in which Seth analyzed Doris’ attitudes and traits, illustrating them with specific episodes formerly known only to her, and ending up with some excellent advice.

He told her that she was projecting this image upon each male she met, and then reacting to it instead of to the individual. He gave her some mental exercises calculated to help her dissolve this false image. Here Doris began to cry a little. Seth smiled and said, “Now, now, do not sniffle. I am not your father giving you an arithmetic lesson. I put myself out to help you, and for this I get tears. I usually do not have that effect on people.”

“He was a woman. His present parents were his brothers in the American Revolutionary period in the same geographical area as now. His brothers were involved as spies. Your Frank, as their sister, disclosed their hiding place in a cellar beneath an old inn. She was captured when she went out for supplies, gave away the location, and could not warn the brothers. She felt she had abandoned and betrayed them.”

Seth went on to say that in this life, Frank chose to return as the son of the two brothers who themselves are now man and wife. “Now he rationalizes his desire not to leave home. The brothers never held him responsible … they knew the girl had been terrified and spoken out of fear with no intent to betray them. There is no punishment involved. He has chosen in this life to be of service to them and to help others. His secrecy [he was very tight-lipped] is the result of these past experiences. Once he feels he spoke too much and betrayed too much. Now he is secretive about matters he considers important.”

Seth emphasized that for his own reasons, Frank did not want a marriage relationship, and ended by telling Doris that she had chosen him for this reason—that she never saw the man as he was, but only the image she had projected upon him. He gave Frank’s name in a past life as Achman incidentally, and much later Doris learned that his present family has an Achman branch.

Much more psychological advice was given. The whole session was of great help to Doris—who hasn’t been frightened of Seth since, by the way! But it is an oversimplificaton to say that all present problems are the result of past life difficulties. We are not “stuck” with our problems, whether they come from this life or another. We don’t have to drag them along with us. They can be solved, and while reincarnational influences certainly operate, they don’t operate in a vacuum. The following chapter on health will contain some of Seth’s methods for maintaining mental, psychic, and physical vitality—and perspective.

An editor I’ll call Matt came to visit us from New York. We had corresponded but never met before. He had read a manuscript of mine and knew about Seth. We liked each other at once, but it was primarily a business meeting. And then, I felt that Matt would want me to “prove my abilities” somehow or other, and I didn’t want to feel under pressure.

Some people, I’ve discovered, have the strangest ideas about mediums or psychics. When I first found this out, I used to knock myself out proving how normal I was. People usually found this very disappointing, and I found it very inhibiting. Now, most of this has just worn off. I’m as normal or abnormal as anyone else.

Actually, it was kind of funny: Matt knocked himself out to show me that I didn’t really have to prove a thing! So for a while our conversation was rather bright and frantic.

“So we find two lives devoted to the nurture of others. But in both cases the personality was filled with an inner dread, to some extent resenting those he helped. If he were out helping others, then who would mind the store? He was afraid his stock would be gone.

“In two other lives, there was instead the development of inner abilities to the exclusion of others, a closing down of windows and barring of doors. He would not look out, and no one dared look in. He would make horrible funny faces at the window of his soul to frighten others away. Yet through all of this, the inner abilities did grow. He ‘added to his stock.’

“This was near Bordeaux. The order had to do with St. John. There was a crest, belonging either to the order or to our friend’s family: a four-tonged fork with a serpent above the upper portion of the handle in the foreground, and in the background either a castle or monastery.

Matt, for instance, was astonished by the character analysis which he said pegged him to a T. More, the crest mentioned by Seth was highly similiar, he told us, to his own private doodle that he sketched while on the phone or in odd moments. Another interesting point: a few years earlier the editor had written two plays—one featuring a monk who lived on the seacoast near Bordeaux, and the other also set in France in the thirteenth century. These facts, of course, were unknown to us.

We did know that the editor was interested in botany, however, and Seth tied in this avocation with the past experimental work done with seeds.

“For as many layers of the self compose the whole self [entity], so many entities form a gestalt of which you know relatively little and of which I am not as yet prepared to tell you.” (This last remark was to lead, much later, into whole blocks of sessions dealing with the God concept.)