“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(For the envelope test tonight I used my appointment card for my visit to the dentist earlier this month. As Jane did last time she visited Dr. Colucci in May 1965, I put myself in a trance state as an experiment, and was very comfortable. I also used Jane’s appointment card of May 5,1965 as the test object for the 15th envelope test in the 199th session. I picked the card for tonight’s session because I thought it would be loaded with strong emotional charges of a personal nature, whereas the identification card used in the last test belonged to a person almost unknown to Jane and me.

(I placed the card between two pieces of card and sealed it in the usual double envelope. To the best of my knowledge Jane had never seen it, since I carried it in my wallet from the time Dr. Colucci’s nurse gave it to me.

The reactions are beautiful examples. First of all Ruburt was worried, somewhat, concerning your own reactions when you found that you now had a new engagement for Friday evening, after already planning to cancel a previous one, in order to have some free time for yourself, and he felt to blame since he had already made a commitment to Mark—rather unwillingly, by the way. But it will harm him in no way to help Mark in his endeavor.

Mark, in attempting to help this other young man, may indeed end up helping himself, for it will turn him outward. But the situation also has other dangers. Because of Mark’s background, subconsciously he fears Negroes; and the fear is so great, unfortunately, that it becomes a fascination. He is repelled and fascinated at the same time.

Let us get back to time. Now. The idea is current in academic psychologicalcircles that the child exists psychologically intact in the man, that the man contains within him the psychological replica of the child that was.

For the inner self can perceive it, and does change it. The idea of inverted time states that time flows in all directions, and that as each action affects every other action, so time constantly affects itself and continually reacts within itself. The past moment is never completed. Consciously you have simply lost sight of it, and have not followed it through in its endless depths.

Some systems experience time exclusively in terms of probabilities, in which the self experiences a particular moment most thoroughly, where continuity is achieved not through a continuity of moments but a continuity of self, as it experiences all the various events that exist as probabilities for it in any given instant.

You merely skip along the surface, and this is all right. But do not regard this hopping from moment to moment, as from stone to stone, as the approximation of time as it actually exists. The nature of perceptions determines the experience of time.

(It was now time for the 32nd Dr. Instream test. As usual Jane sat quietly with her hands raised to her closed eyes. Her pace became quite slow, broken by many pauses of 15-30 seconds. She had been smoking earlier in the session but did not do so now. Resume at 10:10.)

(“A disturbing event in the month of June, ’64.” Jane said she thought this referred to an episode when she should have visited the dentist, Dr. Colucci, but did not. She keeps a brief daily record of activities, and verified her idea. In her notebook she found a record that on May 31,1964, she woke up with a swollen lower left jaw. I thought it a bad tooth. At this time, not having practiced self-hypnosis consciously, Jane had a great fear of dentists. Instead of seeing a dentist she visited our doctor next door; he put her on a series of antibiotics that lasted for four days, on into the month of June 1964. The pendulum told Jane the swelling was psychosomatic and not a tooth; the doctor agreed, eventually, and Seth did too, in the 59th session for June 3,1964. See Volume 2.

(“A connection with another car, not your own.” When I visited Dr. Colucci on January 11 he told me that about a week previously, probably on Sunday, January 2,1966, he had been unable to make the climb up the icy road leading to his home outside Elmira. Dr. Colucci lives on top of a long steep hill, yet this was the first time in three years, he said, that he had been unable to drive home. Jane said Seth gave this bit of test data because we ourselves had had trouble making a nearby steep hill in our own car, also this month. Seth dealt with our own car troubles in the 222nd session. Jane said she thought the association between these two episodes was legitimate.