“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The photograph of Jane is 33 years old. It was taken by an older lady friend who was treating her to an outing at a spa just outside of the New York State resort of Saratoga Springs, where Jane lived with her bedridden mother, Marie, and a housekeeper. In a childish hand Jane had scrawled her friend’s name on the back of the picture, along with the date. Many years later she was to tell me, “My mother hated that woman.” In the snapshot it’s a sunlit day in August, 1941. Jane is 12 years old. She sits on the grass before some evergreen shrubs; she leans slightly back on her right hand, her bare legs rather primly folded. She wears a print dress that had been given to her in the Roman Catholic orphanage in Troy, some 35 miles from Saratoga Springs; she’d spent the previous 18 months there in the institution while her mother had been hospitalized in another city for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Jane also wears a short-sleeved pullover sweater. Her mother had knitted it during her stay in the hospital.

(The outward signs of Jane’s trance performances as Seth are very interesting in themselves, and I don’t intend to minimize them: indeed, I describe them every so often. My real fascination, however, lies with what I call the greatly enhanced consciousness, or energy, that she displays in the sessions — and always I sense an even more powerful flow of that quality just beneath the surface of her delivery. I thought of this as Jane sat quietly in her Kennedy rocker, waiting for Seth to come through. After a few minutes, her right hand lifted to her glasses. As she took them off her eyes were much darker and more luminous than they usually are: She was dissociated — in trance. Seth was there, staring at me.)

(From Seth’s delivery following last break, I’ve deleted less than two short sentences of very personal material. Obviously, Jane and I did choose to meet the challenges presented by the emergence of her psychic abilities 11 years ago. Those “new” abilities offered creative possibilities so apparent that, given our natures, we had little desire to do otherwise; beneath our doubts and questions we intuitively felt the rightness of our decisions. I found that I was able to contribute psychically in certain ways, other than just recording the sessions. And to have at least some of our deepest desires and motivations brought so clearly to conscious awareness, through psychic means or any other way, was more than we’d thought possible in previous years. We found such information especially valuable within the larger social context. With all of this, I was also eager to acquire whatever knowledge was available about both the philosophy and the art of painting.

[...] And, as she just wrote for me, on April 3, 1976, “I always feel an odd, right, somehow sturdy satisfaction, as if someone should be up to watch the day come; and it’s me.”