“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A noise catches my attention. Investigating I see that new people are moving into a back apartment in our apartment house. [There is no such apartment.] I remember that I had forgotten the existence of this apartment and am angry with myself. The apartment is very large, about 10 rooms, lovely dark woodwork. I am doubly angry at myself when I discover a lovely kitchen and bath between this apartment and our own, since we could have used these rooms ourselves, paying extra rent for them.

(The new family is large. The members operate an excellent clothing store inside the apartment, in the center. There is a staircase leading down to a side street. Clothing is arranged on shelves, and so forth. A sale is planned. Then I realize that I did know the people who lived in this apartment before also, and had forgotten. I am aware that I knew them in a dream, rather than in normal waking life.

(The men in the family are dark-complected, handsome men, olive skin. We all get along well and like each other very much. We stand laughing by the staircase. I’m curious about some other apartments, also in this building, and owned by our landlord also. I am happy and anticipatory, looking forward to seeing these apartments. Then on the staircase, in a pile of neatly-stacked clothing I discover a lovely dark green jacket with fur collar and zipper that is mine, and I remember now that I put it away last year for the season and forgot it until now. Another article of clothing catches my eye. I think it is mine for a moment and realize it is not.

(I laugh. These people all like me very much. I leap with more than normal grace down from the banister. One man puts an arm out to assist me. Again, full of joy, great joy, it seems, I look forward to looking at the other apartments. Then I remember that it is nearly lunchtime, and Rob will be home. I decide to go home myself and then return to look at these apartments.

[...] Leonard, a school teacher, knows Miss Callahan, and his apartment abuts hers on the south. [...] A friend helped him move it out to the garage; then on Monday, May 18, I helped him move Miss Callahan’s divan into his apartment.

(On February 17, 1964 our neighbor Miss Florence Callahan who lived in the front apartment on the same floor as Jane and I, was taken to the hospital suffering from arteriosclerosis. [...]

[...] As a last resort the relatives thought of trying to bring her back to her apartment, since she talked constantly of going home; by this however, she meant returning to her homestead of many years ago, which had long since been demolished to make way for a new high school.

(On Wednesday, May 13, Miss Callahan’s relatives asked Jane if we could move Miss Callahan’s blue divan into our apartment, and in its place let them take a hide-away bed we had in storage; this bed to be used for a nurse who was to live with Miss Callahan when she was brought home from the Town House. [...]

(The lawyer’s apartment downstairs front presents another problem. [...] Today Jane learned that his rent has not been raised, peculiarly enough, as of today, June 5. The lawyer never lived in the apartment, for whatever reasons of his own. [...]

Now I am giving you an apartment-by-apartment version simply to make my point. [...]

[...] Your lawyer wanted to get out of a bad situation in the front apartment, and the increased rent serves his purpose. [...]

[...] The high cost of keeping the two apartments will be used by both of them as an issue and excuse. [...]

Some of these feelings are also projected upon the apartment house at large, and mask your deep love of your studio, despite all disadvantages.

[...] To you this apartment house and its grounds are considered in terms of land, and dwelling. [...]

To him other apartments, vacant, that you look at, represent automatically psychic probabilities that intrigue him simply because they exist. [...]

[...] Everyone in this apartment house is seldom in a bad mood at the same time, for example, so to some extent in periods of normal depression you are sustained by others, close by, who are not.

[...] This individual, nameless to us, had built the elaborate shower in apartment five, which is one of the two apartments we have here.

[...] The environment has gone down; the garden apartment here that he once thought of no longer exists. [...]

[...] He did nothing about it on his own, except finally to rent the other apartment, but he has been holding his breath quite literally, for some time.

(It’s true that Jane improved considerably when we took the second apartment across the hall the summer before last. [...]

[...] It is connected with the apartment house. You would like to kick the downstairs tenants out, and you would like to kick your poor landlord, because you think that Ruburt would like that apartment, and you cannot afford it; and he would not, you believe, come down on his rent.

[...] All this quite apart from the normal feelings about health. I mean that in my mind the symptoms were associated with my work as if they cast aspersions on it—quite apart from worrying about what they did to me. [...]

[...] We have the plant here in the apartment from which the slip came however, and its history will be given in the envelope data. [...]

[...] You may if your prefer close your bedroom door you see, neatly dividing your apartment in half during working hours. [...]

A healthy overall emotional climate now fills this apartment house, however. [...]

[...] As stated Jane has never seen the plant at the office in its fine growth—merely a slip from a parent plant here in the apartment. [...]

[...] Merle and Lois Cratsley also live in the apartment house, on the first floor, and do own such a chair. Their apartment adjoins Barbara, and they are of course well acquainted. [...]

[...] Jane said this is brought about through the chair data, and is a confusion arising from the fact that Barbara, who sent us the object, and Lois and Merle Cratsley live on the ground floor of the apartment house, in adjoining apartments. [...]

[...] Barbara lives in the downstairs apartment, beneath us.

[...] That card was sent to us by Leonard Yaudes, who also lives in the apartment house. [...]

In the 737th session, after 11:55, Seth mentioned the “other dentist” who lived and worked around the corner from the apartment house Jane and I moved into in 1960, upon our arrival in Elmira. We soon became acquainted with him and his family on a very casual basis, since the back of his property abuts the west yard of the apartment house. [...]

So, I said to Jane, not only are we stirring things up by moving out of the apartment house, but we’re entering a situation where we will be staying put while others move away. [...]

(We’ve also discovered that several other professional people who live near the hill house maintain offices in the old near-downtown neighborhood surrounding the apartment house.)

3. I found Seth’s statement about contending with the thought patterns of others a particularly apropos one, since Jane and I have lived in apartment houses for many years (and are only now preparing to give up that kind of life.) A question: How does that steady psychic exchange affect all of those who work and/or live in high-rise complexes, for instance?

(The label was brittle and quite brown with age, and broke apart when removed. [...] The bureau it came from is an old- fashioned one that had sat in the garage of “our” apartment house for some years. [...]

[...] The setting up of the ego represented at once the necessity of boundaries, represented a cutting apart from, a divorcing, and a rigid limiting function. [...]

[...] Jane said the impression was not too clear, and that she also had some impression of the living room and terrace of the Instream apartment, which we had seen in July 1965.

[...] We do not know how much he can help, since he has owned our apartment house but a few years.

[...] You have lived here some years yet purposely avoided thinking of it, this apartment, as anything but transitory lest you put down roots and become involved in ways that might distract you from your work and purposes. [...]

[...] You both are so afraid of being tied down however that even in the apartment you did not allow yourselves really to feel at home—to buy your furniture, cheap or expensive. [...]

[...] At the same time for all your protest, the (to me) apartment noises are comforting. [...]

Ruburt did begin to feel more and more apart from the ordinary world, and both of you concentrated upon that feeling of apartness.

(Jim Poett said that we would see the article before it’s printed, at our insistence; I’d find it strange indeed to cooperate with a venture that would end up taking us apart in ways we didn’t approve of. [...]

[...] He still feels basically apart from them in important ways.

[...] Out of all of the apartments for rent in Elmira, why had Jane chosen that one? She had found the apartment. [...] She found the empty apartment 5 at 458 on her first day of looking. When I picked her up after leaving work she directed me to the apartment, and that was that. [...]

[...] Apartments 4 and 5, the ones Jane and I had rented (we could afford only Apartment 5 for the first several years) opened off each side of the hall. Apartment 4 was empty; its door was on a short chain that let me push it open a bit to peek into a now-deserted living room that Jane and I had known so well.

[...] I worried about being an intruder into the domain of the people who lived in those dingy apartments now. Indeed, as we left the stairs two dogs in a back apartment set up a furious barking as they scratched at what I knew were kitchen windows. A friend of ours had lived in that apartment (and I still correspond with him). [...]

[...] When I finish these volumes of personal sessions I’ll be publishing with Rick Stack’s New Awareness Network the transcripts of many of those always hilarious, incredibly active, crowded and loud meetings: full of Seth sessions, member dialogues and repartees and questions that erupted in those weekly classes that Jane held in our apartment’s small living room. [...] Usually on class night, Tuesday, I was secluded in my studio at the back of our second-floor apartment, typing from my notes the session Jane had held for the two of us the night before; then I’d be caught up for the Wednesday-night session to come.

[...] I am standing by Chamberlain’s Dairy outside Elmira, but the scenery doesn’t change, so I will myself to Jane and Rob’s apartment. [...]

[...] The plant room divider always in their apartment is gone. [...]

Apparently Rob and Jane were moving into the same apartment my Rob and Jane have lived in for years, but in another probability.

[...] Now, when she comes to our apartment, she senses this other Jane and Rob moving about just beyond the focus of our normal perceptions.

[...] Jane and I met him in May 1960, when we moved from Sayre into an apartment house close to downtown Elmira. [...] Eventually he moved downstairs when a larger apartment right beneath ours became available: Still later, Jane and I rented the apartment he’d had on the second floor, so that we ended up with two apartments, side by side; we needed more room by then, and didn’t want to move.

[...] Last Thursday morning, then, we were really shocked when Doris, who is also a teacher and a friend from those apartment-house years, called to tell us that David was in the hospital—that he was to undergo triple-bypass heart surgery the next day. [...]

[...] Intuitional knowledge and conscious assimilation are some poles apart, at least in your society. [...]

[...] Those people were not involved in such a psychic initiation, however, in your time, so they can in your terms afford to use such helpful information, and do not feel any need at all to hold themselves apart from it as Ruburt has.

Your immediate situation and all past ones, regardless of personal fears, which should not be discounted, result from Ruburt’s until-now determined decision to stand critically apart from his intuitional knowledge. [...]

[...] Lately the apartment seemed frightening to him because he felt like a rat in a maze, reacting to the same stimuli in the same way, without knowing the reason and without the introduction of any change.

It was the only thing that set him apart under welfare conditions, the mark of distinction that got him to college by the skin of his teeth, and it was, he felt, what made you love him. [...]

[...] To show that he still has some reachable foibles, you still aroused a spark of his old enthusiasm earlier this evening when you suggested that his place (our apartment) still did have possibilities if your eyes were opened to them. [...]

[...] As of the following Sunday, we have already redecorated—to some extent—the apartment, with very good results. [...]

(Also after supper it developed that Miss Callahan, the retired school teacher who lives in the front apartment on our floor, had evidently had an attack of some kind and was in urgent need of help. [...]

(Coming in and out of our apartment from Miss Callahan’s, Jane would tell me of snatches of thoughts she had received from Seth. [...]

Here I found a table and chair set of fine dark wood, and beyond, another spacious apartment. Again I paused: Where had the apartment come from? [...] Indeed, as I hurried down the hallway I seemed to remember other such apartments also.

[...] If I was dreaming then the apartments would disappear when I awakened. [...] And then, out of nowhere it seemed, a sense of freedom and exhilaration flashed — I could explore the apartments if I wanted to! [...]

I came into Rob and Jane’s apartment and walked into a Seth session. [...]

These must be understood not as something apart from the personality, but as a part of the changing personality. [...]