“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In the 253rd session Seth told us he didn’t dream of us, just as we didn’t dream of him, and promised to tell us why soon. Before tonight’s session Jane said she hoped he hadn’t forgotten to go into the matter.

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(Jane’s eyes now opened for the first time. According to Seth both of us lived in Boston before the Civil War, male and female then, as now.)

(Break at 9:58. Jane was dissociated as usual. Her eyes remained closed and her pace was slow. She was aware that she was very restless. Jane said that during one of the longer pauses she felt Seth trying to get at the name Nostratious from the earlier note data. We thought Nostratious Elmo a most peculiar name. In an earlier session Seth told us Jane had been a medium in her Boston life, and that she had misused her abilities. This could account for the mention of a professional name above however. See page 86 in Volume 1.

(Actually this marked the end of the session, but Jane didn’t say so until we had gone through the data ourselves. We made our own connections and did not ask Seth to return to help out.

(We were able to make many connections. Also, the same object was used in the next session, the 258th, and it is interesting to see how Seth picks up some of the same points both times. These points of agreement will be noted in the 258th session.

(As she sits at her desk Jane looks out and down to the grass of the backyard below. The view is high and quite pretty. To her left is the kitchen roof of the apartment below us, but this is to the side and does not obstruct the view. We believe the framework mentioned by Seth is a reference to the wooden window frames, and that the thin lines like poles refers to the narrow wooden frames holding the glass panes; eight small panes make up each of the five windows.

(“Anemia.” Seth gets back to this reference in a moment.

(“Eight.” Eight is one of the page numbers enclosed in the circle in the upper right hand corner of the object, but we don’t know if this is what Seth meant.

(“The connection with anemia leads Ruburt to think of Helga Anderson, or a connection with artists or artwork.” Jane thinks that here Seth was trying to get her to say that an artistic endeavor, meaning the dream book, was involved with the object. Helga Anderson, a good friend, has anemia. She is the wife of Ernfred Anderson, a sculptor who was director of the art gallery where Jane worked part-time for several years. In the chapter five connected with the object, Jane uses a dream of Ernfred’s to make a certain point.

(“A note.” Either Seth saw the folded object as a note in itself, or he refers perhaps to Jane’s penned notes on the object.

(“The month of April.” My penciled date on the object shows I picked it up on May 5,1966. Jane said she wrote the page used as object early in the month of April, and did not throw it away until she had rewritten it a month later. In the next session Seth tells us Jane wrote the object on April 7.

(“Connection with an animal.” Oddly enough, there are several references to animals in the chapter five from Jane’s dream book. In the early part of the chapter Jane used the phrase “cart before the horse,” and Seth mentions horse a bit later. One of the headings for the chapter is Dream Symbols and Culture. Discussing this subject, Jane mentions that fire helped primitive man “keep the beasts away,” etc.

(“The words unholy alliance come to me here.” The whole of chapter five, from which the object comes, concerns the close relationship between dreaming and waking life. We see the idea of alliance here, but not unholy particularly. Seth might have been spoofing us a bit, or it could be a slight distortion. My notes indicate nothing out of the ordinary in Jane’s delivery at the time.

(“A star shape. Something round, again, with spokes leading outward, but rather prominent.” Jane immediately thought of this diagram when she read over Seth’s data. It is on the back of page 112 of the first draft of chapter five of the dream book. Jane believes that she quite possibly made the diagram on the same day she typed up page 80, which was used as envelope object. Page 112 was used in the final version of chapter five, fortunately, and so was not thrown away. I had not seen the diagram before. It is one Jane made to help her see clearly certain points involving the whole self, and waking and dreaming states. There was much handwritten copy beneath it. Jane located the diagram immediately after this session. She said it is the only one she made for the dream book; she has the habit of making many notes on her manuscript, but very few diagrams of this kind.

(“Red or blue.” I am not sure, but when taking the data from Seth I wondered whether this could be connected to the postmark data. At times it is difficult to tell. I used a period after the word postmark however in the notes, so consider the red and blue separately. Jane made the notes on the object with a dark blue or gray pen that gives the impression of dark blue. She said she felt red or blue refers to the fact that she uses two different pens in correcting manuscript—a red one and a blue one; but we are not sure.

(“Connection with four people, one of them disheveled,” I wanted to ask Seth questions about this data but did not get the chance. The object is part of the first page of chapter five of Jane’s dream book. In chapter five Jane discusses dreams furnished by four people specifically—Jane, myself, Bill Gallagher and our landlady, Marian Spaziani.

(Two days after the session Jane found herself reading over her second draft of chapter five. Coming across the TV analogy made Seth’s data about a screen clear to her—particularly when it also reminded her that she’d had a good image of a TV screen while giving the envelope data. Had she not chosen to reread, this block of material would have been missed.

(“Something not done, but begun.” I asked Seth but one question, asking for elaboration on “An initiation not completed.” See the first interpretation of this on page 148. Jane believes the bit of data above refers to the fact that she had begun the dream book, but hasn’t finished it yet.)