“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(2. My effect concerns an interference in my vision, without an actual loss of sight. It produced no aftereffects this evening, nor had it ever in earlier years beyond a very slight headache. Tonight I didn’t get the headache. Strangely I’ve never been alarmed by this phenomenon. With my somewhat secretive nature I’d had no urge, even as a child, to tell my parents about it, or to see a doctor. The absence of aftereffects, and the continued clarity of my mental processes, may have been reassuring.

(The effect, which always reminded me of a mirage, began with a smallish, bright sawtooth pattern of light just to the right of my direct line of vision. Now, with memory of almost-forgotten episodes returning, I knew that this brilliant, shimmering pattern could spread so that as I looked at an object it would be obliterated, even while I still had peripheral vision.

(Now, I wondered once again at my calm response to this as I grew up — to something whose origins were so completely outside any kind of knowledge I possessed. When the interference had been strong, covering most of the field of vision, I had experienced a peculiar sense of both darkness and light, with the objective world indistinguishable within what I can only describe as a field of patterned, alternating lightness and darkness that possessed a velvety depth.

(Tonight’s experience wasn’t that intense. I first realized its onset at about 8:50, and at once began to give myself suggestions to minimize it because I didn’t want to alarm Jane by delaying the session. At the same time Jane began to describe the smile she perceived in the painting; I could see the painting well enough when she asked me to check it, although my vision effect was still building. My suggestions were very beneficial, though, and by session time at 9:05 I realized that not only had my experience gone as “far” as it was going to go, but also that it was on the retreat. By 9:15 the last traces of it were gone and my vision was clear.

(9:21. I had a lot of trouble getting the following sentences down. Many of the words were misspelled, some so much so that I crossed them out and quickly tried again — with the humorous result that the corrections also contained errors. My vision was by now very clear.

(Thus, I had experienced altered states of seeing, writing, spelling, and speaking this evening — all facets of course of my physical means of communication. Sitting in the glare of the brilliantly lit room, I described everything in detail to Jane, including the vision effects of earlier years. She wondered if my loss of communicative abilities was also related to my father’s senility and his own physical retreat. I didn’t know. I hadn’t experienced anything unusual involving him recently.

(But Seth wasn’t through work on his book yet. The following material shows the relationship between my vision effects and the events in the session itself. It’s very interesting that I would choose tonight, of all nights, to try for visual data, although in recent days I’ve been inquiring mentally about subjects for my next oil painting. I haven’t said anything about this to Jane.)

The earlier vision experiences were unsuccessful preliminary attempts on an unconscious level to pick up images of models for your paintings. In the blurred dark portion, the models would have appeared. Do you follow me?

The blurred areas represented a confusion of vibrations. You could not get the material visually in physical terms, though you were trying to, but you could not receive it as internal vision either at that point. Instead you ended up almost with a displacement. There was always a sense of motion in the background that was interpreted visually as an unsteadiness, a massing of blurs.