“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The photograph of me, taken and dated by my father [Robert Sr.], has been kept in one of the Butts family albums for 53 years. In it the time is June 1, 1921. I’m almost 2 years old. I have curly light-colored hair. I wear a one-piece suit, long white stockings, and black shoes. I stand in the side yard of the house my parents rented in Mansfield, a small college town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps a dozen chicks cluster in the grass at my feet while I stare down at them, quite entranced. In blurred focus behind me an unknown teen-age girl sits on a swing that’s suspended from a tree limb, and an empty wicker stroller-type carriage [mine?] stands beside her. Parked in a driveway in back of her is a four-door touring car with a fabric top. I might add that Mansfield is only 35 miles below Elmira, N.Y., where Jane and I live now.

(Jane’s blond hair — which was to turn quite black — is neatly parted and combed, and she wears a barrette in it. Her face is youthfully round, but quite unsmiling. She’s not scowling. Rather, from her position on the grass she just stares directly out of the photograph at the viewer, displaying a sober, almost controlled regard that seems out of place for one of that age….

(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.)