“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The 47th envelope experiment was held during the session, as noted by the tracing on page 91. The object was a faded maple leaf that Jane and I had picked up, along with others, on a walk last year, probably in October 1965. I subsequently made a watercolor drawing of this leaf and another. As will be seen the object led to some data that is somewhat difficult to evaluate, but Jane and I believe it legitimate.

(Try as we would neither of us could recall just when we picked up this particular leaf, other than that it was in the early fall. I thought of October, then checked this with the pendulum, which for me is quite reliable. The pendulum agreed with my conscious answer. The location of just where I picked up this particular leaf is important in the data, and this we are sure of. This will be explained. Suffice it to say now that Jane and I will never cease to be surprised at the turns impressions attached to such experimental objects can take.

Give us a moment, please. We will give an object shortly. First of all, an impression of an unpleasant occurrence connected with a woman in a blue dress. A separation of a kind that has occurred, and a connection with tall statues.

The object, a shoelace that he holds in his hand.

Connected with the object: The impression of a pile, or pyramid of small things like stones perhaps. The shape of an ice cream cone. A pyramid shape.

(“Do you want to try naming the object?”)

(See the tracing of the object on page 91, and the notes on page 92. At first the data meant little, but Seth’s answer to the second question furnished the key that made it intelligible to us. It would have been quite opaque to an outsider. This is a case where Seth used the object as a springboard to delve into data that is connected to it through location mainly. My thought was that the bulk of the material he gives had more appeal emotionally for him than the object itself, and he confirmed this after break. Still, the turn the data took was unexpected.

(The connection between the envelope object and the death-in-the-family reference is, simply, that the object was picked off the sidewalk beside the home of my Aunt Mabel, and that Aunt Mabel, Jane and I attended the funeral of the family member. The connection is more complicated than this, but to avoid confusion I will explain this portion mentioned above first.

(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.

(“Gun. Something to do with a gun, or something triggered, or explosive.” More references to the situation outlined above. Note that most of this data has meaning for Jane in a strong way because of the emotional content, and that I am relatively unaffected. As stated, the connection between the envelope object and Aunt Mabel and her home had to be made before this data fell into place. I did not understand much of it on my own.

(“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.

(Seth gave a few impressions connected with the object, the maple leaf, itself, at the beginning of the data, and at the end when I asked him to name it.

(“Connected with the object: The impression of a pile, or pyramid of small things like stones perhaps. The shape of an ice cream cone. A pyramid shape.” As noted, Jane coupled this data with a large gesture of a triangular or pyramidal shape. See the tracing of the object on page 91. The maple leaf is roughly of a pyramid shape.

(“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.

Now. Joseph is correct, the impressions were mainly emotional ones, connected with the object.