“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon while painting I had a vision. With my inner eye I saw the face of an older man, facing to the left in full color. I made two pencil drawings of the image. It was quite clear, especially about the eyes, nose and mouth; and later I realized that I had been “seeing” it for at least a few moments, almost absent-mindedly, before I understood what was happening.

(I had prepared a test envelope to give to Jane during the 181st session, of August 25, but did not do so because of the short session. When the envelope was not used I did not mention it to her, but saved it for tonight’s session. It contained part of a calendar page for April 1965. I came across the calendar beneath a stack of books and on the spur of the moment decided to use it for the test, wondering whether this type of cut and dried subject matter would have as much emotional pull for Seth/Jane as the subject matter of the first two tests. See the 179th and 180th sessions. Jane was out of the house when I prepared the usual double envelope.

(The session was held in our small back room. Jane began speaking while sitting down and with her eyes closed. Her voice was quiet and she used pauses, although her pace picked up considerably as first break approached.)

The experience was a good one for Ruburt, since it served to give him additional and much-needed confidence. I attempted to give several definite characteristics that would serve to identify your Jesuit’s mother, and I believe that we succeeded.

(During the session Seth gave an accurate psychological account of Bill Gallagher’s mother, according to Bill. She is now dead, and Jane and I never met her. Bill has told us very little about her, other than that she was an arthritic cripple like Jane’s mother is. Three points in particular were quite authentic, according to Bill. Seth stated that his mother “was fascinated by numbers,” loved the color blue, and was inordinately fond of flowers. After the session Bill Gallagher told us his mother had been a bookkeeper, was buried wearing a blue dress—blue was her favorite color—and that she was indeed very fond of flowers.)

(Break at 9:17. Jane was dissociated as usual for a first delivery. Her eyes had remained closed, her voice quiet but fast. She had used some pauses however. She resumed in the same manner, with some longer pauses, at 9:26.)

(Break at 9:49. Jane was dissociated as usual. Her eyes had remained closed, her pace had been rather fast.

(Our bed is in the small back room we usually use for sessions. During break Jane sat on it while she smoked a cigarette. The break was rather long, and Jane had started on her second cigarette. She was still on the bed when Seth came through again. Jane has yet to speak from the prone position for any amount of time. She came close to it this evening, leaning back upon an elbow quite often.

(Her eyes opened soon after she began speaking, and she continued smoking. She was quite restless. Most of the time she spoke from a sitting position. Her eyes closed at times for a sentence or two. They were very dark, and her voice was quiet and fast. Resume at 10:00.)

(Break at 10:26. Jane was well dissociated. It was one of those instances, she said, where she was “totally involved” with the material she was delivering. She felt as though she was inside the material. Her eyes had been open most of the time, and she had been quite restless. Her pace had been fast.

(During break Jane mentioned that Seth had not yet discussed my vision, noted on page 223. Nor had I given her the test envelope. I had discovered that I was reluctant to break into the material when it was going so well, and when Jane gave such an indication of involvement with it. I thought it might introduce an alien note, and also that it might interfere with the results of the test itself.

(I did not mention the envelope, and in view of the late hour decided to forget about it for this evening. Jane began speaking while sitting cross-legged on the bed. Her eyes opened again shortly after she began. She was smoking, and her voice was quiet and fast. Resume at 10:33.)

The man was an acquaintance of yours in a life many centuries ago. He no longer experiences earthly or physical existence. I know of him. I do not know him. He was a teacher, and is one now. He was a relative when Ruburt was Seth. He knows of our relationship, and was curious.

(The very first sessions dealt a good deal with reincarnation. Jane and me did not ask for this kind of data; it just came that way through the Ouija board and we accepted it at face value. Frank Watts, it will be remembered, was our communicator; the present Seth entity did not announce his presence until the 4th session, when he superseded Frank Watts.

(In the 3rd session, December 6,1963, Frank Watts told Jane and me that we had lived lives in Mesopotamia, our first, in the 4th century BC. Frank Watts and I were females, Jane was a male, our brother, and his name was Seth.

(In the 54th session Seth went into considerable detail in explaining the construction of entities. He could not give us this information earlier, he said, because we would have leaped to the conclusion that he was Ruburt’s [Jane’s] subconscious mind; this is not so. As everything else does, entities constantly change. To quote Seth: “Ruburt is not myself now, in his present life; he is nevertheless an extension and materialization of the Seth that I was at one time... He grew, evolved and expanded in terms of a particular, personal set of value fulfillments... He is now an actual gestalt, a personality that was one of the probable personalities into which Seth could grow. I represent another, I am another.”

(Jane, still sitting cross-legged on the bed, smiled and learned forward. Her request caught me by surprise, and it took me a few moments to fish the test envelope out of its hiding place and lay it on the bed before her. It was 10:58; I thought it much too late for a test.)

(End at 11:02. Jane was dissociated as usual. She said that as I fumbled around trying to find the test envelope, she was forced to wait. During this period she spoke to Seth: “Okay, I’m staying in the background, so you can come through loud and clear,” or words to this effect.

(When she opened the test envelope to see a clipping of a section of a calendar page, containing numbers and a few spots of red and yellow, Jane was quite disappointed. Her reaction was similar to my own as I listened to her recitation of the test data. A very interesting fact now dawned on both of us when we looked at the back of the clipping; for here we found most of the data Seth had given was quite correct.

(In making up the test, I had unwittingly focused my conscious attention on the calendar side of the paper. This was the first time I had used a test object containing material on both sides of the paper. The makeup of this particular calendar consisted of the days of the month on one side, and a drawing in color on the other.

(The test paper was folded once. The number five was on the calendar side, in the upper center. Directly back of the number, on the other side of the paper, were two buildings, one an erected house, with just above it a floor plan of another. There was a yard, and trees, and a blue simulation of blueprint paper in back of the floor plan.

(Returning to the outside, calendar side of the test paper, there were several strings of numbers. The calendar month was April 1965, although the year date doesn’t show. Returning to the other side of the paper, we see that a road leads up to the garage attached to the drawing of the erected house.

(Thus it seems that Seth traveled through the thickness of the paper, picking up impressions as he went along, and did this at least twice. He also mentioned “two people...perhaps a dress.” There were no people on either side of the test paper. Checking the whole calendar however, we noted there was a drawing of a man and a woman on the upper section of this particular page, but that I had left them behind in clipping out the test section. They would be about four inches removed from the clipping, and stood before another drawing of a house. We do not know if this is a legitimate interpretation of something “somehow connected with what we have here.”

(Wind is an intangible, and is not overtly indicated in the drawing. These are a draftsman’s drawings, quite precise in detail. The background material is rather freely and loosely brushed in, so that a breezy and modern effect is indicated. We do not know if this effect prompted Seth’s mention of wind. The effect of the drawing was one of “much space.”