“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(See the tracing of tonight’s envelope object on page 71 and the notes on the next page. The empty envelope used as object was mailed to me last May 26,1966, by an old friend, Wendell Crowley, and contained a letter detailing a reunion of a group of friends, all artists, that Wendell and I worked with in 1941-43. The letter was not in the envelope but was kept separate by me for reference after the session. As I suspected, some of Seth’s data referred to the contents of the letter rather than the envelope object itself.

(Wendell’s letter of May 26 is two typewritten pages long, and at the moment we do not plan to include a copy of it with these notes. If necessary we will do so; in the meantime the letter remains on file with other envelope-related material. Other background material may be necessary to fill in the relationship between Wendell, myself and our friends discussed in the letter, and this will be included in our interpretations of the envelope experiment data. Some geography is involved also.

(“A double, or something twice, or a negative.” Relatively little of the data refers to the envelope object itself. Instead the empty envelope from Wendell serves as a springboard. This data is a case in point. After break Seth agrees with Jane and me when we assign the double or twice mentioned here to the frequent use of the numeral 2 on the second page of Wendell’s letter.

(Wendell uses the numeral 2 to indicate the second page of his typed letter. He mentions the 20th anniversary of a friend’s wedding. He discusses the fact that although he is recovered from a heart attack of last year, he cannot lift over 20 pounds, and must take a 2-mile walk each day. The numeral 2 appears once on the first page of the letter.

(The negative mention in the data is interesting, and has several connections, both here and in the rest of Seth’s data. Jane and I did not think of negative in connection with the word no, for instance, but in relation to pictures or visual images. On page two of his letter Wendell tells about a friend who works for the Neilson TV survey people—having to do with pictures. But also, negative, meaning pictures, is called to mind because Wendell’s letter deals with a group of artists who worked together in a studio, drawing comic strips, in 1941-3. In addition I personally have a studio here in the apartment, and the envelope used as object was kept in this studio. These references about studios, pictures, and the object crop up again later in the data also.

(“The number four.” We seldom can make positive connections with single numbers. The number 4 appears three times on the empty envelope object. See the tracing on page 71.

(“Two again, like a double exposure.” See the “twice” and “negative” data on page 77, and the listing of Wendell’s use of the numeral 2 on the second page of his letter. Double exposure, above, also has picture and artist connotations.

(See the one thirty-five data on page 80.)

(See page 78.) Too disconnected, I am afraid. Your friend wrote a letter to a man in Michigan, immediately before or after writing this letter. This was the M also—a name something like Murray. No, more like Musach—

(“Do the two studios account for the twin data?” See page 78.)

This, and also the frequent 2 mentioned on the same page.