“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“At 8:45 I walked into the living room to waken Jane for the evening’s session. She continued to lie quietly on the couch, eyes closed, but in a few minutes told me she’d just been visited by a most strange sensation. From her description of it I thought she might have been exploring an ability related to the inner senses. So far, Seth has explained six of these. (Several years later, Jane was to list nine such inner senses in Chapter 19 of The Seth Material.) Jane said that upon coming slowly awake from her nap she’d had the very peculiar feeling of ‘growing larger.’ The laughing phrase she used was that she’d felt as ‘big as an elephant.’ Her boundaries of awareness seemed to have expanded. Holding her hands up on either side of her head, she indicated a width of almost three feet; her head had literally felt that wide to her.

(So Jane experienced a modest series of unusual psychic events before the sessions themselves began; some details on these have been given in earlier notes. Her first massive sensations in March [estimated], 1962, were followed by these phenomena in 1963: our York Beach experiences in August; her reception of Idea Construction in September; her massive feelings in October [estimated]; the outline she produced for ESP Power [or The Coming of Seth] as a result of the Idea Construction adventure; and the beginning of these sessions in November, through our trying certain experiments listed in that outline [as Jane explains in Chapter 1 of The Seth Material]. It didn’t occur to us to label any of those events as “psychic” until the event of Idea Construction. Listing them as I’ve done here is also apt to artificially set them aside from the flow of insights within the poetry Jane has written since childhood; actually, of course, all are related.

“Jane added that when we close our eyes we’re aware of a certain ‘area of blackness,’ one we’re used to. While she’d been in this unusual state, that area was much enlarged — she used the words ‘infinitely large’ to describe it. Jane said it was as though her eyes had actually moved further apart to create this expanded field of awareness, of infinite black. She hadn’t sensed anything happening within this area, but thought that she might have, given more knowledge and experience. She hadn’t been frightened by the sensation, and went along with it. She didn’t have it now that her eyes were open, yet the physical feeling of enlargement had been so strong there could be no doubt of it …

(Jane finds her “massive feelings,” as she calls them, not only instructive psychically, but exhilarating indeed when they encompass revelatory or transcendent states of consciousness. One day in April, 1973, she had a fine series of encounters with massiveness, many of them embodying those extra qualities; see her own account of the whole adventure in the notes for the 653rd session in Chapter 13 of Personal Reality.

9. On facing pages in our album, Jane and I have a pair of large, rather formal photographs of ourselves that we’ve often joked about. [...] Jane, in her photograph, is 6½ years old. [...] More than once Jane has asked me what I’d have thought at that age had I been aware that my wife-to-be was a “round-faced little kid, still playing with paper dolls….”

(“I’m just waiting,” Jane said at 9:25, after we’d been sitting for the session since 9:10. [...]

[...] The sounds of the package, for example (as Seth, Jane crumpled an empty cigarette package), or the fingernails across the table (demonstrated), are magnified, for in the cellular world they are an important outside-the-self cosmic event — messages of great importance. [...]

[...] (Jane held up her favorite ashtray, the abalone shell we’d found in Baja California in 1958, and tapped some ashes into it from her cigarette.) The predictability of that gesture rests upon the basis of an unpredictability, in which multitudinous other actions could have occurred, and in other realities do occur.