“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(While conducting these sessions, Jane and I have had remarkably few interruptions either during them or just before they were scheduled to begin. However, this evening we did have such an experience, although it was brief.

(At 8:50 a friend of ours, Howard Kimball, arrived. He is on the board of directors of the gallery, which Jane has just left. Howard wanted to look at some paintings, and of course some conversation ensued involving the new director at the gallery, who was discussed by Seth in the 74th session.

(Howard bought a small tempera of mine picturing two apples; and then to Jane’s surprise he bought off the wall of our apartment a small abstract oil that Jane and I had produced jointly, in a humorous attempt at working together. The little painting had turned out well and attracted much notice. It was the first piece of art work Jane had ever sold, and she was pleased.

(Howard left at 9:11 PM. Jane said the visit had disturbed her somewhat, a fact that I had not appreciated from observing her. She stood beside my table, waiting. At 9:12 she began to dictate in a rather normal voice, although as the session progressed her voice gathered quite a bit of volume at times. Once again she did not wear her glasses. Her delivery was rather slow, as was her pacing. Her eyes were dark as usual.)

(Break at 9:35. Jane was dissociated as usual. She now told me that she had been upset by the delay in starting the session. This time wearing her glasses, she resumed in a rather unhurried but emphatic manner, her voice a little stronger, at 9:40.)

(Jane delivered the above sentence with much emphasis, her voice deepening considerably at times.)

(Now Jane perched on the table, sitting down upon it, and laughed and pointed at me.)

(Break at 10:22. Jane was fully dissociated; so much so, she said, that she hadn’t followed the material at all, and had no idea whether it was any good or not.

(Jane well remembers the evening when she first consciously conceived Idea Construction, and so do I. Checking her manuscripts yields the date of September 10,1963, as when she made her first notes. I remember walking out to the living room where she writes her poetry, having finished my own work in my studio in the back of the apartment at about 9 PM; Jane’s first words were “Boy, have I got a great idea,” or to that effect. She then told me about idea construction, which I didn’t go for very much. Checking with her while writing this up, she said that she never did do any poetry that night; the idea came to her as she sat down to write poetry after supper, and she spent the evening on it.

(It might be interesting to quote here the first paragraph of notes Jane made that evening: “Basic idea is that the senses are developed not to permit awareness of an already existing material world, but to create it. The inner image [idea] is projected by the senses outward to create the world of appearances. [Camera in reverse, for the eye, for example.]”

(As Seth states, Jane did have a dream about the idea the following night, September 11,1963. She recalls it quite easily. However she has no written record of the dream, since this was before she had cultivated the habit of keeping a dream notebook. As mentioned many, many sessions ago, however, her poem The Fence, written in May 1963, clearly foreshadows the Seth material, dealing with [but not always by outright name] such subjects as reincarnation, dreams, unperceived worlds, etc. [See the poem on page 28, Session 5, in Volume 1 of The Early Sessions.]

(Jane resumed in the same manner at 10:33.)

(See the 59th session for the data on the past lives of Jane, Dee Masters and myself in Boston, prior to the Civil War; and see again the 87th session.)

(This bit of data really made me sit up and take notice. Jane has not heard from her schoolgirl friend Marie Tubbs for some months, and if Marie was pregnant we did not know it. They have exchanged a desultory correspondence for some years, and have not met since the early days of our own marriage, ten years ago. But because they were such good friends in school days, they have managed to keep in touch with each other over the years.

(Jane will now write to Marie to see if Seth is correct; if not, or the data is distorted, Jane will try to learn from Marie what association she could have been involved in with water. Marie’s married name is: Marie Sterrett, of Boynton Beach, Florida.)

(Usually I would be willing to continue in such instances, but seldom do because it keeps Jane working longer.)

(End at 11:02. Jane was dissociated as usual. She was wearing her glasses, but after the session she asked me how often she did have them on, since while delivering the material she doesn’t see anything. I told her that lately she has had her glasses off perhaps a third of the time, something she did not used to do. Jane’s delivery had been quite animated giving the last few pages of the session. My writing hand was also tired.

(I will include a copy of the very long, vivid and involved dream I had involving Jane, Bill Macdonnel, three friends of a family from Sayre, and my father, before whatever session Seth uses to discuss it. This dream also was followed by what I believe to be a sequel, a week or so later.

(September 18, 1964, Friday: This was a long, complicated and very vivid dream that seemed to consume hours. It was in full color. In the beginning Jane; Bill Macdonnel; Clark, Alice and Larry Potter; and myself were in an apartment I did not recognize but took to be occupied by Jane and me. [Clark and Alice Potter had been our landlords in Sayre, PA, for over four years. The four of us had liked each other from the start and had always gotten on well together. Larry is their teenage son, and they have another son, Norman, older by a year or two, who was not in the dream.]

(Kneeling beside an old-fashioned living room table with a shelf underneath it, I saw a foot-high pile of Jane’s drawings and paintings. Pulling one out, I was surprised at the vivid colors in the drawing, and the marvelous three-dimensional form it contained. A pastel drawing of a green leafy tree especially charmed me, and I exclaimed to Bill and the others that Jane’s drawings were much better than I had thought them to be, or had realized she could do.

(Then Bill and Jane were gone. I was in the living room of the apartment with Alice and Clark, looking back toward a kitchen finished in brown wood paneling. In an intermediate room I saw Larry Potter. He was wearing a chamois-type fall jacket with knitted cuffs. He seemed to me to be taller and heavier than I had known him to be, which was about my own size. The amazing thing to me was that Larry was frantically busy at a wringer-type washing machine that was gushing forth a stream of water from its outlet, into a bucket that was almost full.

(Next, Jane and I had been attending a party in a building on a busy downtown street corner, on the second floor. I did not actually see Jane but knew she was there at the party. Many people were about. I entered this part of the dream as I left the stairway to move out on the corner for a breath of fresh air. I was now dressed, and it was daytime. As I stood on the corner with people passing me in all directions, I stretched my arms high above my head. Then to my surprise I saw my father ride past me, past the corner, on a bicycle. Father was wearing a familiar brown hat, and a long brown topcoat, incongruously enough, and he was his present age. His face was very smooth-looking and pink-cheeked, looking very healthy, and he seemed to pedal past me quite easily, as a youth would do.