“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

While experimenting, we found that I could make a rapid decisive motion if I exerted great mental force. Rob asked me to lift a coffee cup with a normal gesture. (Earlier, he had held the cup while I sipped the coffee.) I concentrated as hard as I could on what he wanted me to do — which seemed hilarious to me, and an impossible task — and then really made a supreme physical effort. As a result, my hand jerked up high, suddenly, and then just as suddenly swung back, banging the cup back on the counter.

Rob made coffee for me. I didn’t believe I could lift the cup. When I finally did, my motions were extremely slow, as in a slow-motion motion picture. Rob made me drink two cups of coffee. He had me stand with my head out of the kitchen window in the cold night air, but nothing seemed to help. I just seemed to be in a weightless body in which I had little interest. By now I was rather frightened, yet I thought that I could snap out of it if I really exerted all of my will power — or knew how.

(Margaret Bumbalo gave Jane a colored-glass butterfly of yellow and blue-stained glass, opened flat for a wall decoration, and fastened by a suction cup. [...] But when I awoke to the fact that I could fasten it to a window pane via the suction cup, it was transformed somehow into a perfectly valid, evocative decoration of nature. [...]

[...] Such as her impulse to hold a cigarette in her right hand again, or to reach out with her left hand to scratch her right thigh, or to hold the cup she uses in the morning to rinse out her mouth while the nurse does her teeth. Jane does hold the cup now, but wants to hold it for the entire operation now, she says, which takes several minutes. [...]

[...] I tell the “help” that this isn’t my cup of tea, they will have to help; at the same time I discover that this isn’t the best silver as I’d thought but serviceable enough stuff. [...]

(Last night, Jane said, she’d also surprised Lorrie by holding her own cup as she drank some ginger ale. [...]

[...] Then Jane had some ginger ale; she held the cup herself. [...]

[...] For example, in the kitchen I had her try to lift an empty cup up from the counter. [...] As a result her hand holding the cup would fly up head high suddenly, then just as suddenly bang the cup back down on the counter.)

[...] I didn’t believe I could lift the cup. [...] Rob made me drink two cups of coffee; I stood with my head out the window in the cold night air. [...]

[...] Jane also ate little, except for several cups of iced chocolate milk. [...]

[...] Supper didn’t work out, though — after taking a half cup of soup she began to throw up, and lost it all. [...]

Some improvements, again, have begun, barely noticed: the additional mobility in the morning, when a short while ago Ruburt would sit for an hour or more after breakfast while you brought him his second cup of coffee. [...]

(Then when Jan was helping Jane with her dental chores this morning, she noticed that Jane’s hands were working better—Jane even automatically reached out to hold a cup to her lips that ordinarily the staff people had to do before. [...]

Who do I share this image with?
What ghost haunts this house?
I smile and reach for a cup of tea
And motions beyond my will begin.
My fingers move smoothly out
And lift the curving spoon.
With just the proper touch
They pick the china saucer up.
Yet I have nothing to do with this.
Who moves the cup? [...]

[...] Then she sat on a stool at the counter, smoking and having a cup of coffee while she looked at TV across the barrier. [...]

(His wife was drinking a cup of coffee in the kitchen. [...]

[...] In your spontaneity then, never forget the sacred uniqueness of a shadow upon a road, the shape of a leaf, the stain upon a coffee cup—in these simple things find a hint of your own uniqueness and travel beyond them—and ignore conscious restraint that would bind you. [...]

(“No,” I said, going out to the kitchen after my cup of coffee, which I’d forgotten. [...]

[...] Yet really the idea’s right here,” she said, nodding toward her cupped hands, which she held just below her chin.

[...] Seth then told Peggy to drink two cups of coffee at breakfast. [...]

[...] From the viewpoint of the concerned and conscientious ego-self, truly there appears to be great and disastrous evils that overflow like poison the cup of human existence.

Now I come to you often with playful characteristics—like a benign bishop who comes for a cup of tea and discusses realities with you. [...]

as my cupped hands