“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Unpleasant episodes remind Ruburt of your parents. (Jane smiled.) In connection with the episodes, four, four in the afternoon or four people, two male and two female. A distant connection here with a death in the family involved.

As in trying to go two ways at once. A pulling in two directions, with a balance of tension resulting. Some connection with a child here, and the color purple.

(My Aunt Mabel lives around the corner and two blocks down the street from us. When Jane and I went for our leaf-gathering walk in October of 1965, we picked up the maple leaves in our collection beside Aunt Mabel’s home; this is the section of the street where the maple trees grow, and one of these leaves made up tonight’s object.

(Aunt Mabel and I seldom see each other. Jane has met her just three times during the eleven years we have been married. The third time was at the funeral of my Aunt Ella on August 8,1965, in Wellsburg, NY. Thus the most recent time that Jane had a chance to speak at length to Aunt Mabel involved the funeral of a member of the Butts family. In addition Seth dealt at length with Aunt Ella in the 176th session of August 9,1965, the day after her funeral. Note that the object was secured two months after Aunt Ella’s funeral. We have noticed this curious time jump before in the envelope experiments, backwards as it were. Jane possessed strong emotional memories regarding the funeral, and clairvoyant knowledge of the envelope object in some form; evidently Seth responded to, or deliberately chose, what he perceived as the stronger intensities pertaining to Aunt Ella’s funeral over the object itself.

(It appears that Jane has formed an association that links Aunt Mabel with funerals, as seen above. If this seems tenuous, we think the idea reinforced by the fact that Jane and me and Aunt Mabel also attended another funeral together—that of Aunt Mabel’s husband, who died several years ago. This was the first time Jane met Aunt Mabel. Thus Aunt Mabel was involved with funerals and related activities on two out of the three occasions that Jane has spoken with her; these two occasions being the times when Jane could exchange more than greetings with her, also. Jane and I do not think tonight’s envelope data contains any references to the death of Aunt Mabel’s husband.

(“Tension, as something evenly balanced. Tension like wires… As in trying to go two ways at once. A pulling in two directions, with a balance of tension resulting.” Jane is subjectively sure these impressions refer to the telephone calls she was involved in, and the conflicting desires of the family members. Everybody had their own ideas, and the conflict had to be resolved on rather short notice. Things were of course finally straightened out.

(“Unpleasant episodes remind Ruburt of your parents. In connection with the episodes, four, four in the afternoon or four people, two male and two female. A distant connection here with a death in the family involved.” The death in the family reference here could mean only Aunt Ella, which led us to Aunt Mabel and her home, near where we obtained the envelope object. Without going into detail here we can say that four refers both to the time of the funeral services, and an idea involving Jane and me and my parents, in connection with the funeral, that wasn’t carried out.

(“Red and yellow, strips I believe, and a cardboard backing.” I used two of the maple leaves Jane and I gathered on our October 1965 walk as subjects for a watercolor painting. The envelope object is one of them. Both of the leaves were fall colors—red and yellow, with some green. There may be other connections here but we did not ask Seth. I don’t see the strips reference, or the cardboard backing.

(“It is something from a gathering. Bordered in white, I believe. Darker in the center, or at least outside of the white portions. And something that seems to go inward here.” This is Seth’s data in response to my request that he name the object. The object is something from a gathering—a gathering of leaves. Bordered in white can be a reference to the rough white watercolor paper on which I did the painting. I painted only the two leaves and their cast shadows, and left the rest of the paper white. Thus the leaves are darker in the center of the painting, outside of the white portions.

(“And something that seems to go inward here.” is interesting to me, a good description of how the two leaves curled at the edges during the several days it took me to make the very detailed drawing. The curling took place as they dried out; they had been damp from being outside. This curl cannot be seen in the tracing on page 91 to any degree. In order to get the object inside the first of the two envelopes I had to flatten it out. This pressure caused the leaf to crack in many places; it is by now very brittle. After the experiment I had to tape it to a sheet of paper in order to preserve it for the notebook in which we keep our envelope objects.

(Aunt Ella was buried in Wellsburg, NY, a small town near Elmira. Jane and I do not consciously remember the name of the funeral director, and at the time of the services did not see any children about. Ann Diebler, whom I work with, lives in Wellsburg; she has witnessed a few unscheduled sessions. The day after this session was held she confirmed that the funeral director has two young adopted daughters, one 10 years old, the other 12. They are in fact sisters. Jane and I cannot say whether or not we ever heard, or knew, that the funeral director had daughters, adopted or otherwise. We saw him just the once.)