“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last Saturday evening Jane and I met here at the hill house with a group of people who used to attend Jane’s old ESP class. One of those former students, who now lives out of town, had a rather heavy cold—and now I think that for the first time in many years we too may be developing colds. Or something!

This little session is almost book dictation. I’m also presenting it because it shows how an event on one day of our lives—a television program—influenced Jane’s delivery of one session of the Seth material. Other factors are involved, of course, as they always must be, and I refer to one of those at the end of the session.

Jane was very relaxed after supper. When I got out to the living room to wait for the session, I found her watching one of those fascinating, multiple-subject science programs on the educational channel: Various experts were discussing topics like childbirth and sound, Kirlian photography, astronomy, particle physics, and so forth. After the program ended at 9:00 I explained to Jane out of my own limited knowledge how particle accelerators—“atom smashers”—work. She partially grasped what I told her. I suggested quickly showing her an article I’d recently filed on the subject, but she didn’t want to see it.

“No, it’s just that before that program I felt he had a lot of complicated material to give, and I couldn’t get it afterward,” Jane replied. We continued to wait. At 9:23: “Now I can tell he’s got a new chapter heading…. I hope he comes through with something. I feel awfully funny. Actually, I feel like I’m in a trance,” Jane said with unwitting humor, “but not the right one….” And it developed that she never had had a session quite like this one.)

(9:42 P.M. Seth’s references to my facial changes while sleeping touched upon a subject Jane and I had meant to ask him about several times; she’d referred to it again today. My eye improvements had been “officially” verified by our optometrist, John Smith, on February 18. [See Note 1 for Session 901.] A few nights before that, Jane had awakened and turned on her table light, sitting up in bed to have a cigarette as she sometimes does. She’d noticed my expression as I lay sleeping on my back: “One of bliss, almost, though I don’t like the word, and it’s not the right one anyhow,” she told me the next morning. “But I’ve seen you sleeping before, and I knew the difference.

I now reminded Jane that John Smith had knocked on our back door at suppertime tonight. She exclaimed in surprise: She’d consciously forgotten that event, for she hadn’t seen John as I briefly talked with him on the back porch. He’d stopped by on his way home to give me my old lenses, since he’d forgotten to do so at his office four days ago, when I’d had them replaced in my favorite old frames by the new, weaker lenses. I told Jane I felt that regardless of John’s evocative visit Seth would have mentioned my eye phenomena tonight, given his subject matter for the session. And yet, I added, because of the very nature of the Seth material, I’m also bound to think that beneath that simplified explanation there are “deeper” connections—in which the television program, her reactions to it, John’s appearance, and tonight’s session are all related. Jane agreed.)