“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

First of all, Ruburt may continue with his daily psychological time experiments. But these are to be carried on but once daily, and if he tries any other sort of experiment, such as he tried with the Father Trainor poetry session last week, then he is not to attempt his regular psychological time experiment for that day.

I do not approve of a whole day being given over to the sort of experimentation carried on by Ruburt last week in the Father Trainor sessions. In one respect I do agree with Ruburt, in that any future experiments with friends would be of better advantage carried out using chairs at a table, and actually making as few suggestions as possible.

(Break at 9:30. Jane was not as deeply dissociated as she has been recently. She knew the gist of what she had said. Looking back at the Father Trainor episode, she said she was somewhat frightened in retrospect, and would not conduct such a lengthy experiment again.

(A copy of Jane’s account of the Father Trainor affair will be found at the end of this session. This took place on February 11, Thursday, and parts of it are recorded. A shorter repetition, also recorded, was given for Judy and Lee Wright on the evening of February 12, Friday. It was this occasion to which I objected.

(It will be noted that in the 12th session, January 2,1964, Seth, without being asked by us, stated that he “knows” Jane’s old friend, Father Trainor. Father Trainor was an Irish Catholic priest who visited Jane and her ill mother regularly, for years, during Jane’s grade and high school days. He has been dead for some time. Jane has a photograph of him.

I quite understand Ruburt’s curiosity when Father Trainor’s voice did indeed come through, although far from perfectly. And it did represent another phase of Ruburt’s developing abilities. But these abilities must be trained. I do believe that Ruburt has learned an important lesson. As his abilities do develop, it is even more important that he take walks, and that some frequency in daily contact with others is maintained.

(End at 10:37. Jane was well dissociated. Once in a while Jane and I have discussed extra sessions, but usually we do not have the time, particularly when other experiments like the one involving Father Trainor crop up. Occasionally we would like a session dealing with some specific problem, and may try this approach. Also one involving questions and answers.)

(Notes from Jane’s version of the Father Trainor experiment of February 11, 1965.

(I am not sure exactly what happened, much less what caused it. I’m writing a prose sketch of Father Trainor. I thought that if I tried reading G. K. Chesterton’s Lepanto, and Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard the way Father Trainor used to, my memory would be refreshed. I wanted to describe his poetry readings for the sketch.

(I stood up and began to read. The sudden volume and depth and timbre of my voice was instantly apparent, and startled me. I read all of the Lepanto and part of the Elegy in this manner. My voice boomed—I sounded more like Father Trainor than like myself. The volume of my voice was really tremendous.

(After lunch I decided to try again. At lunch I played the tape for Rob, then while posing for him I suggested to myself that I would go into a trance as soon as I began to read, and that Father Trainor would indeed use his voice to speak through me, if he was available. I then started all over again with the readings. Except, for what reason I do not know, I turned the recorder on but forgot to depress the “record” button.

(Rob suggested another possibility: that as a medium I am starting to learn to let others in contact with me speak out. Perhaps, because I knew Father Trainor, I let his voice come through as a starter.

(As a check I suggested later that Jane try reading a different poem, one not read by Father Trainor, to see if she could summon this powerful new voice at will. I wanted to see if something Jane had no emotional involvement with, via memory, could also be used to summon voice changes. Nothing happened. To begin with Jane could not consciously summon nearly the volume of voice, and within a few lines she was so hoarse she had to rest. She said Father Trainor always read the Lepanto and the Elegy on his Sunday visits, and that she could not remember his reading anything else.

(This voice was not the Seth voice by any means. Even at its strongest Seth’s voice is a dry and intellectual one. The Father Trainor voice was very emotional by contrast. I do not believe that the Father Trainor voice at its best exceeded Seth at his best, and vice versa.