“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Neither Jane nor I could remember what last Thursday’s session was about, and I had but one page of it typed from my notes — a situation quite similar to that prevailing before the last session. We were ready this evening by 9:20. At 9:30 Jane said she was starting to get “bleed-throughs” about Seth’s material for tonight.)

(Seth indicated Jane’s bangs, which were close to hanging over her eyes. I’d been meaning to trim them.

(At 9:39, the telephone began to ring insistently. I answered it while Jane came out of trance. The call was a follow-up to a long-distance one she’d taken shortly after supper tonight, and concerned a missing person and a government agency. No other details need be given here, except to say that the case was a complex one.

(Although she doesn’t usually do such work because of the time required, as well as her own emotional attitudes, Jane had given impressions during the earlier call. She was told now that those impressions had checked out very well, so, in an exchange that lasted for three-quarters of an hour, she gave more such information. She finished with the tentative understanding that by midnight she’d receive another call, after there had been time to check her second set of impressions. Jane laughingly told me that if the new data “wasn’t good enough,” she’d probably never again hear from the people involved — but at this time we didn’t realize what was to follow.

At one time there were also species of birds, however, with high intelligence — this before the period mentioned earlier.² They were not humanoid; not, for example, people with wings. They were large birds, with the capacity for dealing with concepts. They were social, could swim well (pause), and for some time could live on the water. They had songs of great beauty, and a most extensive vocabulary. They had talons. (Her eyes wide and dark, Jane held up her hands, fingers bent as though ready to grasp — or claw.) When he was a cave dweller,³ man saw these birds often, particularly in cliffs by water. Many times the birds saved children from falling. Man identified with their easy flight up the cliffsides, and followed the sounds of their songs to safe clearings. These memories turned into the angel images. In each case in those times there was the greatest cooperation, on a global scale, between species. The inner impetus toward development, however, came from the innate comprehension of future probabilities. In that picture all species alive at any time joined. This included plants and fauna. Those who cooperated survived, but they did not think in terms of the survival of their own species alone — but, in time terms, of a greater living picture, or world inviolate, in which all survived.

(11:02. Again the telephone began to ring. It was the expected, if somewhat early, third call in the series already described. While Jane was coming out of trance once more, the caller told me about being “impressed” by her abilities — and, I thought privately, considerably surprised. When Jane came to the phone, she was informed that insofar as it was possible to verify her earlier data, practically all of it had been correct. Encouraged, she now gave additional impressions; these were more specific and personal. By the time she was finished it was 11:38.

(12:18. Jane’s trance had been excellent, her delivery strong and sure. And since we decided that we were up to it, Seth returned in a quarter of an hour with better than two pages of material for Jane and me. The session was finally over, then, at 12:50 A.M.)

3. Nor was I quick enough to ask Seth if the material Jane delivered for him tonight constituted any kind of contradiction with that of the 689th session; for in that session he discussed man-animal and animal-man as existing within the Tertiary Period. Presumably these “mutated forms” had implied the beginnings of man, in ordinary terms, yet now Seth spoke of cave-dwelling humans as coexistent with large birds at an earlier time. Had Jane distorted information in one session or the other? Was it possible that during the complicated rhythms of history, man could have been man (at least approximately as we know him) even before the Tertiary Period, then moved into a long cycle of animal-man forms before returning to being man again? In tonight’s session had Jane tuned into data on a parallel (or probable) reality, for example? Too involved to determine, these questions, on too little material.