“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The day after this session, Jane greatly enlarged upon her original estimate — three hours — of the time she’d need to interpret the long or slow sounds. Now she felt that “to do proper justice to them would take years — centuries perhaps.” Because of our ordinary time sense the sounds were actually so slow to us that they appeared to be motionless, or “dead,” she told me, leading us to speculate that this may be one of the reasons why in usual terms we call inanimate matter — rocks, for instance — “dead.” But Jane couldn’t really define any sources behind last night’s material, beyond calling them “consciousnesses, or beings — but maybe not personalities as we think of that term.” Then, again increasing her estimate, she said that if “they” tried to communicate with us through sound, through our sensual equipment, “it would take forever.”

10. Sound, and various symbolic attributes of that phenomenon, are uniting factors in back of much of Seth-Jane’s material, and I could list many instances. I’m not referring here only to “outside” developments like Jane’s powerful Seth voice, her speaking and singing in Sumari, or her slow and fast sounds as produced for this session, but to inner, audible and inaudible manifestations or translations of sound.

In the 24th session for February 10, 1964, Seth explained how a recent vision I’d had, involving a ladderlike series of heads opening and closing their silent mouths, had really been my attempt to cast inner data into a more familiar outer-sense kind of perception. “You felt sound,” Seth told me. After my initial unease over this new type of experience, I found it most intriguing; I’ve had my own little adventures embodying that feeling perception of sound ever since. In the same session, Seth discussed Jane’s periodic feeling of sound; in her case, she often hears music internally.

Seth, from the 154th session for May 12, 1965: “Basically, the physical body has the potential for perceiving stimuli on a generalized basis. By this I mean that although the eyes are for seeing, the ears for hearing, and so forth, the potentials of the physical body include the capacity to hear, for example, through any given portion of the bodily expanse … Sound, then, can be felt as well as heard, although in such cases you may say that the sound is heard in the depths of the tissues; this, however, being an analogy … Ruburt, in feeling sound, merely experienced it from a different perspective.

After she’d grappled with her reception of some long-sound material last night, Jane spoke a few words for Seth. It was then that we began to glimpse what we could call a “source” of the long material — for Jane told class that from our physical viewpoint “Seth’s true reality had sounded like a mountain” to her. [...] By making a strong effort she’d speeded up her reception of him so that he came through sounding like the familiar Seth. [...]

[...] As we’d expected, her long-sound experiences hadn’t recorded well at all. [...] While Jane had been straining to compress a long syllable into something recognizable, the tape picked up little except distracting background noises: class people coughing, or moving about or shuffling papers; the sounds of traffic … But Jane and I take class events as they come. [...]

(In ESP class yesterday evening Jane engaged in one of her periodic and unusual “long-sound experiences,” as we call them. [...]

[...] Very few of them had witnessed one of Jane’s infrequent “long sound” sessions, as we call them, although a fair number had heard us describe the phenomenon at one time or another. [...]