“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I am speaking of the relationship in your mind between your father and automobiles. Has this occurred to you?

It does not matter whether the car is old or new, as long as he has one, and it is for this reason that he fights any of your suggestions that you do without one. The car is also to him a complementary image of his father, who was always on the move, more so than most men, while his mother could not move at all. A lack of a car also makes him fear a return to poverty, since in his neighborhood any car at all was a sign of luxury.

Now your situation is not only entirely different but contrary, for to you a car represents, because of your father, an image on one hand of perfection. Your father insisted, because of his work with batteries, upon perfection. An old car hardly represents this image.

(I am 46. As a young boy I used to watch my father make automobile batteriesby hand. He had his own business in Sayre, PA, and took great pride in the excellence of his work. The business began to fail when batteries became mass produced, and the great depression finished it.)

Your father would like to kick at old cars, for he felt that they defied him since they worked improperly. More than this however, both of your parents still feel that a car is a symbol of social status, and you grew up with this. When your cars were new you felt at one with them. But an old car brings back the old struggles between your parents, and it is precisely here that subconsciously you and Ruburt do not agree. He gladly settles on an old car—anything that moves will do. But to you the old car has not meant freedom, but imperfection.

There is also a lesser connection here with the garage in which your father spent so much of his time, for you picked up your mother’s anger that he was so often there. One small remark and you may take your break: Ruburt, for the reasons mentioned earlier, also liked anything with wheels that moved, roller skates for example. Anything that offered hope of mobility.

One note: Your father felt ineffective and a failure when an automobile did not work right, because of his connection with them, and you picked this up. Which is highly ridiculous, as you can see, since your own interests lie in other directions.

(Break again at 9:51. Jane said she realized of course that she enjoyed having a car, any kind of car, available. But she hadn’t particularly associated this with the reasons Seth ascribed to a need for mobility. Nor had she made any great connection with the idea of her father being a traveling man. My idea was that Seth had mentioned these things briefly in much earlier sessions.

(“The habit of squirreling away” is a good reference to my father, in whose photographic studio my brother Loren took the pictures he refers to in the test letter. The studio is in part of my father’s cellar; the rest of the cellar is stuffed and cluttered with odds and ends my father has accumulated over the years. The rest of the family views the overloaded cellar as a fire hazard.

(“A connection with four people, I believe men.” Three men and one woman were present in the studio when the pictures shown on page 198 were taken, for the correct total of four people: Jane, myself, my father and my brother Loren.

(“A studio.” Refers to my father’s photographic studio.

(“Two o’clock.” would seem to be a reference to the time the photos were taken of Jane. On a Sunday after a noon dinner at my parent’s home Jane, myself, Loren and my father went down to the photographic studio.