“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The envelope object for tonight’s 35th experiment was a beer coaster that I picked up from our table last Saturday evening, at our favorite dining and dancing establishment here in Elmira. It was the one I had used. Jane and I met two young couples there by prearrangement, and we had much fun dancing. The coaster is made of heavy absorbent cardboard, so I peeled the top layer of paper from it. This contained the design, printed in red, without any unusual thickness to furnish Jane unwitting clues. It was sealed in the usual double envelope between two pieces of Bristol.

(Jane spotted it at break at 10:28 before I did: part of the above data seems to pertain to this evening’s envelope object. This was interesting to me especially. I prepared tonight’s envelope sometime after supper, then forgot about it in the press of other business. When the time for the envelope experiment arrived, I then had the idea the envelope contained another object, one I had thought of earlier in the day. So my surprise was considerable, consciously, when Jane opened the envelope and revealed the coaster.)

(“Something that resembles a shield in shape, with inscriptions upon it.” We suppose that since shields are of many shapes, this can apply to the shape of the envelope object. The printed copy on the coaster can be inscriptions. Our dictionary does not distinguish as to whether inscriptions need be lettering or designs, such as the three glasses on the coaster, or can be both.

(“Either the inscription or the insignia is of red color.” Our envelope object, the coaster, is printed in a bright red. The color of the porous paper or board is a typical light beige or tan, not resembling metal, and certainly not heavy in weight for its size. Seth also mentioned these last two points in connection with the Instream data for Monday.

(“The edges of the object would ordinarily be sharp, it seems, but they are somewhat blunted.” Jane was perhaps more definite concerning this impression, than any of the others. She feels the sharp edges is a reference to the beer glasses depicted on the coaster: one can think of glass ordinarily as sharp-edged, but to be useful as a drinking vessel the material would have its edges smoothed, or blunted.

(“I get the numbers one eight eight eight, in connection with this.” My own idea here is that Seth/Jane picked up the three-ring design shown on each of the three glasses depicted on the coaster, and translated or converted this data into the number 8, three times. There is a graphic resemblance here. The numeral 1 appears in the code number, in small type, next to the bottom border.

(“A rectangular shape”, does not obviously apply, in that the coaster measures square within 1/32 inches.

(“with an indentation that could suggest a border.” The object has a border, as can be seen in the tracing. In actuality the border is indented, or debossed, into the porous paper or cardboard material of the coaster, to the extent that it can be easily felt with the ball of the finger. This is a common effect obtained easily enough by the printer, through control of the pressure the printing plate applies to the object, and one which I work with often on my job. Jane however is not familiar with the term, debossed.