“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 8:30 this evening I finished typing Monday’s short session [for the 8th]. I’d forgotten to do it last night, so absorbed was I in working on the copy-edited Mass Events. Then I made a surprising discovery as I put the session in private notebook number 23 — for there I found my original shorthand notes for the September 3 session. I’d also forgotten to type that one, and for the same reason, evidently. I believe that’s the first time in well over a thousand sessions that I’ve forgotten to type one. I’ve deliberately let a few go for a while because I was busy on other things, but haven’t simply forgotten any. Jane missed the September 3 session, but when she asked me about it a few days ago I replied that I was up to date. I remember wondering why she asked. …

(Pause.) In many instances, of course, you learned too well, both of you. The natural person that is yourself loved to draw and paint. You did that apart from what you had to do in school as a boy. You were lucky in your relationship with Miss Bowman.¹ Your talent brought you into correspondence with her. You can trust your natural inclinations. These sessions, in that regard, came naturally, as the expression of natural abilities and tendencies, finally emerging despite your official views at the time, jointly.

1. Helen Bowman — Miss Bowman, my parents and I always called her — was my art teacher in the Sayre, Pennsylvania, high school from 1935 until my graduation in 1937. Through an arrangement with my mother, Stella Butts, Miss Bowman loaned me the money to attend commercial art school in New York City from 1939 to 1941. I was drafted into the Air Force in 1942, during World War II, and repaid the loan over my three years of service.

A note added 14 years after Jane/Seth delivered the magical-approach material: Miss Bowman died in 1994, at the age of 96.