“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Returning east to Sayre, Pa., he opened his auto-repair and battery shop. (Again, see Note 9 for the 679th session.) Through our early school years Linden and I had part-time “jobs” at our father’s shop, and many chances to watch him work. I think that his exacting mechanical abilities are reflected in Linden’s very realistic models, and are transmuted in the methods I use to solidly “construct” my paintings and to keep the records for the Seth material.

When your picture was taken, therefore, your parents were already living in a probable reality, but you and [your brother] Linden were not. Now take your break.

Linden was the one “natural” child of this marriage. Watch how you interpret that, but he was the child least affected by other realities. For that reason, however, and because of your parents’ personalities here, the same amount of attention was not paid him psychically, and he felt that lack.

The Butts family albums contain numerous photographs of my father as a young man, many of them self-taken with the aid of a timer; he poses with a variety of automobiles and motorcycles through the years before his marriage to my mother in 1917, and afterward, too. Sometimes he’d assembled the vehicles himself, or modified them in his own ways. In 1922 he took his wife and children (I was 3 years old, Linden not yet 2) on a six-month motor trip from the East Coast to California. When our touring car broke a rear axle on a remote dirt road in Montana, he fashioned a substitute in a blacksmith shop.

Linden uses words now as a framework to contain creativity and communication, rather than to express them. [...] Linden was far less venturesome in that respect….

[...] The separations in the family began to happen after Linden and I graduated from high school, left Sayre, and started to work our respective ways through college and an art school. Then came long periods of military service for the three of us (World War II for Linden and me). [...]

(Picking up the photo of me:) Not in this picture, but quite alive, was your brother Linden. [...]

[...] Linden would not. [...]

The first episode involved a couple I will call Jim and Ann Linden. [...]

[...] It had been in the back of my mind all the time I talked to Ann Linden over the phone.

[...] “The Lindens only want to know about their little boy. [...]

[...] I told the Lindens my attitude, and Ann smiled. [...]

[...] I would have liked my wife’s comments on my brother Linden being in the dream. [...] I think that as I joyfully talked about my magical exploration in the dream, I was telling him something like: “Hey, there’s more than one way to explore the self, to be religious!” And I think that Linden and I were in correspondence in the dream state, and that in some way he got the message. [...]

[...] My brother Linden, from out of town, could have been there. [...]

(I told Jane I’d had another one of those long, involved, being-pursued dreams last night, this time involving my brother, Linden, who is 13 months younger than I am. [...]

[...] Here’s the relevant portion of the description I wrote for Through My Eyes: “Then I saw my mother [Stella] between my brother Linden and his wife, all separated each from the other a little bit, all walking obliquely toward me across a featureless plain. [...]

“Linden and his wife were close to their present physical ages in the dream, a year or so younger than I am, at 54, but Stella looked to be a few years younger than she should have been [she died at 81]. [...]

Ignoring the light, I willed myself to go to the house of the Linden family, across town. [...]

[...] When we were there, I had Rob drive around to Linden’s. The house was exactly like it had been in my experience, with the side porch removed and a front one added.

One strand of your mother’s consciousness — that one involved with you — is intertwined with your reality because of her interest in homes.⁵ Another strand of hers is involved because of her interest in families — and hence with the children of your two brothers, Linden and Richard.

In a very small measure you can see how this works when you think of your mother in, say, her last years, and compare your idea of her with those of [your brothers] Linden and Richard. [...]