“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.)

The interruption did bother him somewhat, as he was prepared for a session on time, per usual. I will however continue along the lines of our previous discussions.

(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.)

(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.

(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.]

The dreaming self, dear friends, is not aware of the conscious self. The whole self, the entire inner self alone, holds knowledge of the direction in which it moves. The directions can be likened to conscious selves. Any individual on the physical level who has achieved great things has done so because his so-called conscious self was intuitively (and underline the word intuitively) aware of the selves of which he could not be consciously aware.

The tub was the unifying symbol of the dream, interpreted by the various levels of the subconscious. On the most superficial level, dreaming Ruburt thought “One day I shall be an old tub,” meaning an old worn-out vessel. This having to do with the disappearance of early youth, and having superficial meaning to the surface female personality.

The tub was next interpreted as a washing machine in a secondary level that was in itself a symbol leading to the next interpretation, belonging to a past life, that of an old tub that leaked. In his dream the washing machine leaked, leading him into a third level, where the tub was a symbol for the old ship that leaked when you, Joseph, were a passenger on your way to Boston in a past life.

The connection picked up again. The past administrator of the gallery was known to you in that life, and was a passenger on the same ship. Here Ruburt was led backward to the first level momentarily, being reassured, saying “I will not be the old tub, she was and is,” therefore on a surface level overcoming jealousy because the former administrator spent so much money on clothes and appearance.

Ruburt knew he could look better if he spent half the time and effort, but was jealous anyway. So here the symbols coincided. He obtained subconscious information concerning your past life, the one symbol of the tub serving three purposes. It gave him information, it helped overcome his jealousy, and it was a transition from surface significance to deeper knowledge.

At the same time the word tub referred also to a friend of his, a woman whose maiden name was Tubbs, and informed him subconsciously that she was in difficulties, as when the tub or old washing machine leaked. Here the leaking of the tub referred to the leaking ship on one level, and to the difficulties that were being experienced by her old friend on another.

(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.

(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.

(Glaring at me, Larry shouted at me to get him a pie pan, that the washer was going to overflow the bucket any second. I yelled back that a pie pan wouldn’t hold much. The machine was jumping around while Larry held it down. I don’t recall any water on the floor. The next I knew, Larry was very angry with me; he stood right beside me and towered over me, yelling something about me being some kind of nut or dope, and that I needed a good punch.

(Then, Alice Potter and I were driving down Route 17 to Sayre. She was very sympathetic to me, and I may have forgotten the reasons. I believe she was wearing a nightgown but am not positive. Alice parked the car in front of my parents’ home in Sayre, put her arm around my shoulder and said something. I then got out of the car and she drove away. I saw my parents’ home clearly there on Wilbur Avenue, but I did not go into it. Instead I started walking up Mohawk Street, around the corner toward Keystone Avenue, a block away. I was going to a theatre, a big one, on the corner of Keystone and Mohawk, though actually none exists there. I was now in striped pajamas. [I have none like this.] I was well covered by the pajamas, which were loose and baggy, and not at all nude.

(Next I was walking up the center aisle of the darkened, crowded movie theatre, still in my pajamas but not at all embarrassed or concerned that others would or could see me. The place was dark of course but I could see well enough. I was looking for someone or something I could not find.

(Then the show was over and the crowds were leaving the theatre. It was night outside, and I was sitting on the green grass in front of the theatre, beside Mohawk St., again quite unconcerned as many well-dressed people passed me by. I still wore the pajamas and was quite in possession of myself.

(Then my brother Dick, looking perhaps a little younger than he is now [about 36], was approaching me, smiling down at me and saying something to me. He was fully dressed, wearing a jacket. Dick was accompanied by a thin, sharp-faced man in dark-rimmed glasses, neatly dressed in a dark suit and white shirt and colored tie, and a slim rather good-looking woman I did not know. This couple with Dick did not speak to me, as I recall.

(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.

(I was very surprised to see Father. As he passed me he turned his head to look back at me over his left shoulder, smiling serenely all the while. Caught by surprise with my arms up in the air, I quickly lowered my left arm somewhat, holding it stiff, and waved at Father with my hand revolving at the wrist. I did not bend my arm but waved at him awkwardly with it held stiff so that only my hand moved. Father did not speak a word to me, nor did I speak to him or call after him. He kept on pedaling, seemingly up a slight incline just beyond the intersection. This was the end of the dream, and it made quite an impression upon me.

(September 24, 1964, Thursday: Is this dream a sequel to the previous dream? Again in color. My two brothers, Loren and Dick, and I were in a room something like a courtroom, seated behind a long low polished dark-colored table. The three of us sat facing our mother, who was behind some kind of higher desk or bar. She was her present age.

(Some kind of steady noise pervaded the air. Mother spoke to us, or one of us asked her what the trouble was, I am not sure which. Mother answered, but though I saw her lips move plainly, I could not hear what she said. The three boys leaned toward her. I believe it was I who then asked her to repeat what she had said, over the noise which was something like a rushing wind. Leaning forward at the table, I then heard mother say very distinctly, “Father has a spot on one lung.” This was the end of the dream, and it woke me up.

(However, the three of us did meet with our parents last Sunday, October 4, 1964, to handle some family business. None of us knew of any such meeting at the time of my above dream of September 24, simply because the meeting had not been scheduled yet, or indeed even thought of. And I must admit that such was the involvement in the problem at hand when the family did convene on October 4, that I completely forgot the dreams at the time, never realizing that I had dreamed of a family get-together 10 days before it took place. This clairvoyant aspect of the second dream is discussed by Seth in the following session.)