“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon I made up the usual double test envelope, including a pair of Bristol stiffeners. The envelopes contained a black and white photo of York Beach, ME, taken there last summer, that is the summer of 1964. It is of a view I scouted from our motel window. I took it for reference for a future painting, and consists mainly of a mass of tangled marsh grass in the foreground; in the background rise a couple of average-looking houses, a telephone pole and some wires. I obtained excellent detail in the rhythmic pattern of the waist-high grasses, which was what I wanted.

(I wasn’t decided whether to ask Jane to hold an envelope test. On the one hand I didn’t want her to feel I was pressuring her for a test every session; on the other hand I wondered whether she would think I was taking it easy on her if I skipped the test. So I thought I would see what developed in the session.

(The session was held in our back room and was not interrupted. Jane began speaking while sitting down and with her eyes closed. Her voice was quiet, her pace slow at the beginning, with pauses.)

(Break at 9:20. Jane was dissociated as usual for a first delivery. Her eyes remained closed. Her voice grew somewhat heavier and stronger as the delivery progressed, and her pace speeded up.

(Jane’s dictation was quite fast along in here, and I finally had to ask for relief. This is the first time such a situation has developed in some time. Usually it takes place when witnesses are present.)

(Jane’s voice now hovered on the edge of loudness. Her pace was still good, her eyes closed.)

(Break at 9:50. Jane was dissociated as usual. Her eyes remained closed. Her voice had been good, her pace quite fast at times. She had been aware of the deeper and stronger quality of her voice.

(Jane said she hadn’t been in a poor or depressed mood lately so much as a period of transition. Having finished one project, the ESP book, she was beginning a new venture, the book on the Seth material itself. At the same time she was casting about for another endeavor. Whether it would prove to be short stories, a novel or poetry, she did not yet know.

(Jane paused at 10:07. She sat with her eyes closed, her head down and her hands to her eyes. Her voice was quiet and she used pauses, a few of them long.)

(Break at 10:20. Jane was dissociated as usual. Her eyes had remained closed, her voice quiet. She said that when she heard Seth ask me for the envelope test, she became nervous, for as Jane she had no intention of asking for a test. Then, Jane said, when she realized she did feel nervous, and that she was sitting stiffly, she relaxed and let Seth take over.

(“Something to do with a circle” is interesting, in that our motel at York Beach, where this photo was taken, is situated on a circular driveway in back of the beach hotel that fronts on the ocean. In the photo the marsh grass comes out as “dark leaves against white,” and the photo was taken in the afternoon of a bright day. I recall this easily enough because I had to wait until the sun was in the correct position to give a good contrasting result in the black and white photo that I wanted to use for reference.

(“A place which you have both visited” is of course York Beach where the photo was taken, and “water nearby” is the ocean perhaps 75 yards away.

(Jane tells me that “a mistake of sorts connected here somewhere” could refer to a mix-up concerning the room we had rented at the motel, but I do not recall this personally. It was nothing serious, Jane said, but a bookkeeping error on the part of the motel room clerk, to the effect that our room had been reserved for someone else, in advance; we were to be moved to another room, she said, but the transfer never took place. There was no unpleasantness involved.

(Jane said she felt she had learned several things at once during this test. While Seth was giving his data on the photograph, she said, she was also aware of several images of her own. It was as though she heard what Seth was saying, then conjured up her own separate set of visual images. Jane said she is particularly aware of this because as a rule she does not see images at any other time.

(Jane said the key point here is that although she had these images of her own, she did not give voice to them as part of Seth’s data; she was able to appreciate the difference. She said it is difficult for her to learn to use herself to the proper degree in interpreting Seth’s material, without interfering with it.

(While she was giving Seth’s data, Jane said she had images of a childhood playground in Saratoga Springs, NY, with houses nearby, but recognized this as her own data and did not give it as Seth’s. She felt sure the test object had a northern, as versus a southern, background, but did not say so because Seth did not say so.

(All in all, Jane was pleased with the results of the test. Much of the time in the past she had been quite critical about test results. She now resumed in a quiet voice, and with her eyes closed, at 10:30.)

(End at 10:34. Jane was dissociated as usual. Her eyes had remained closed, her voice quiet.)