“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

SESSION 260

(The 55th envelope experiment was held during the session. Notes pertaining to the object will be found along with Seth’s data given during the experiment.

(Jane was especially logy before the session, and remarked that she didn’t feel much like having one. She decided to go ahead, however. I felt somewhat tired also. It was a warm and rainy night, which didn’t make us feel any more active.

Now, we will have a short session.

(Seth first mentioned this in the early sessions, shortly after January 1964.)

(Break at 9:26. Jane was “out” as usual. Her pace had remained very slow. Many of the pauses during the delivery lasted for over a minute. Her eyes began to open finally, and she smoked a cigarette and sipped iced tea. She said she thought the session would be short.

We are going to have a brief session.

I will give you our Instream material now. Give us a moment, please. Incidentally we are having a short session to give Ruburt a rest, and also to give you a rest, Joseph.

(See the tracing of the envelope object on page 171. I found it in a drawer of my desk about an hour before the session and decided to use it for the object on the spur of the moment. I opened up the match folder and removed the matches, then sealed it in the usual double envelope. I knew Jane hadn’t seen it for at least a couple of years, and after the session she confirmed that it had been longer than that.

(I picked up the matchbook in a restaurant, Mother Goldsmith’s in Saratoga Springs, NY. Jane has been familiar with the place since childhood, and on our infrequent visits to Saratoga we always stop in. I dated this particular matchbook on the inside when obtaining it—August 1963, which was before these sessions began in December 1963. The book is printed in black on a dim yellow—as Seth calls it—cardboard stock. All the copy on it, except for Nate Goldsmith’s name beneath the caricature of him, is in this dim yellow against the black background.

(It wasn’t until Jane and I began to study the envelope data that we realized it referred to more than one visit to Saratoga on our part. This immediately complicated things. Interpretations became elusive indeed, and part of our knowledge that two visits to Saratoga were involved was subjective only. Had we realized this by the end of the session we would have called Seth back to help out. As it was we didn’t appreciate what had happened until the time came to write these notes. Another complication is that while we cannot pin down all the data, we feel that most of it is quite legitimate.

(I will indicate below where we believe the two Saratoga visits are referred to in the envelope data. The first visit was in August 1963, the second was in the summer of 1964. On both occasions Jane and I were on our way to York Beach, Maine, on vacation; both visits to York Beach played a part in these sessions, and exact dates can be found in appropriate sessions. See Session 9 in Volume 1.

Now we will close our session. My best wishes to you both. I am quite prepared to go on for some time. However you can stand the change, and so we shall close early. I shall look in on you now and then, however.

(End at 10:11. Jane was “out” as usual. She said Seth felt affectionate at the end of the session. She held the session tonight not only because she didn’t want to miss it, but because under similar circumstances in the past the results have been good. She had confidence that if she really shouldn’t have a session Seth would either call it off entirely or make it very short.)

(261st Session, May 23,1966. Tracing of the pencil drawing of Jane, used as the object in the 56th experiment.)