“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“I wish there were words to use besides clairvoyance or precognition,” I said, since I was somewhat reluctant to attach them to the newspaper experience. That is, at the time I hadn’t had any feeling that those qualities or terms might apply to what I’d sensed — nor do I now. Perhaps I was merely afraid the experience wasn’t clairvoyant, I said, yet I felt our vocabulary was limited in some indefinable way in such cases. A copy of my newspaper experience is attached to this session.¹

(I must say that I hadn’t expected Seth to discuss the event this evening, nor had I asked that he do so. Also, for someone who wasn’t sure they wanted to hold a session to begin with, Jane’s delivery was excellent — usually fast and quite emphatic throughout.)

Science might admit that the novel idea itself was highly creative, an example of the mind at play as it used experience as a creative raw product — but of course you had your experience before you read the article. And when that kind of thing happens science then proclaims that the two events are not connected to each other at all, but are instead the result of coincidental patterns.

(9:31.) Give us a moment … As you lay there you were aware of the fact just beneath consciousness — usual consciousness — that you had not brought in the paper before your nap, as is your habit, and almost at a dream level you idly wondered what stories it might contain. Your inclusion of the hospital mixup in the tale was, as, you suspected, connected with the medical ideas you have been dealing with of late (in extra notes for Mass Events, and the book by the physician) — and here was an excellent fictional idea, you see, that could, among other things, bring those ideas into prominence.

The idea, then, of the novel came from past and future events, though you were to catch up with those future events very quickly. Your mind intuitively organized all of that material, and put it together in a completely new fashion. Sometimes when such events occur, the precognitive trigger is not even recognized when it is encountered physically, because it happens too far ahead of time. (To me:) You organize mental and physical events in a creative manner. In this case a novel was involved because the concept, while strongly involving images, carried a time span that would make narrative necessary.

I do not mean that the reunion was inevitable or predestined, but the vigor of that probability, you might say, magnified the original tension. I want Ruburt to apply all of this to his own situation, both in terms of creative endeavors and his physical situation, so that he begins to understand that he can start to react in the present to a future recovery.

(Long pause at 10:01.) He can see how important periods of letting go are. Your experience happened when you were nearly asleep, but merely relaxed, not worrying, with your intellect in a kind of free flow. You were not hampering it. It was momentarily free of limiting beliefs, and it naturally used — and chose to use — the magical approach to answer what was a very simple, now-forgotten intellectual question: What might be in today’s newspaper?

The usual answer, or the usual method of obtaining an answer, was at the time inconvenient: You were not about to get up, go outside and get the paper, so on its own the intellect pressed the magical-approach button, you might say, getting the information the quickest and easiest way possible.

(10:09 P.M. “Brilliant, hon,” I said to Jane as she quickly came out of her trance state. She was pleased. For someone who hadn’t known whether they wanted a session, she’d done very well, with her delivery being often fast and emphatic. I told her that it looked as though Seth used my newspaper incident to actually summarize in capsule form much of the material he’s been giving us in this latest group of private sessions. “You couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of the whole thing,” I said.

(A note: the way things “work” … On Thursday morning—the day after this session was held — Jane and I saw the three young men referred to in the newspaper article on a well-known variety show. Very interesting. One of them said he’d had “a dream” about having brothers. The others weren’t as definite, but at least indicated they hadn’t felt alone. The TV host never referred to the fact that the three youths were actually members of quadruplets — that a fourth brother had died at birth, according to the news article. Neither did the brothers. I also mentioned to Jane the similarity in the adoptive last names of two of the brothers: Kellman and Gelland.)

I lay down for a nap in the bedroom after Jane got up from her own. I had the following ideas as I lay in that state between waking and sleeping. I found myself musing about what I thought was a great idea for a novel. I tried to describe it to Jane as we ate supper and watched the news on TV.

I thought of myself as a woman at the mall in Big Flats, near Elmira. As I went through a double revolving door I caught a glimpse of a young man, say in his mid-twenties, who was an exact duplicate of my own son, who I knew was not in the mall, but was away on business of some kind. The shock of seeing my son’s double was so great that instead of chasing him to question him, I had to sit down on a bench to recover. By then the young man was gone. I envisioned myself returning to the mall again and again to see if I could see the person — and finally I did. Either I followed him to his car, then talked to him, or followed him to where he lived with his parents — but he bore an uncanny resemblance to my own son.

On the front page of the paper was a rather long story, with photographs, telling how triplets were united by “chance” last weekend in New York City — a case we hadn’t heard of in the media before now. I’d forgotten to describe my idea for a novel to Jane, but the article immediately reminded me to do so. There were similarities in the story that reminded me of my own experience. The first two of the brothers were reunited through a friend (instead of a mother, say) who noticed the resemblance between them. Turns out the three were given up for adoption at birth, and although they knew they were adopted, they didn’t know they belonged to what actually had been a quadruplet group. (A fourth brother had died at birth.) Their unknowing would match my own dreamlike idea of the two young men living in the Elmira area but not knowing of each other. Even the ages of the triplets — 19 years — places them fairly close to my son’s age of 25 in my reverie, rather than, for example, brothers in their 40s.

I was quite struck by the similarities between the news story and my own experience. Jane thinks that because I forgot to bring in the paper before I lay down, I may have tuned into it, out there in the box beside the mailbox. I didn’t have any strong feeling that I had, however, but get a few thrills as I finish this account.

I should add that I lay down at about 4:20. On weekdays the motor carrier usually leaves the paper in its box around 3:15–3:30, so the paper was “in position” for me to zoom in on it. In fact, we can see our box on the road from our bedroom windows, looking slightly north. I pull the shades before lying down. I don’t remember if I happened to glance at the box today while lowering them. The box is perhaps 45–50 feet from the bedroom windows, and its backend is toward our house. I can tell if the paper has come, though, by looking across the road into our neighbor’s box. On weekends, when the paper is delivered in the morning, and is sometimes late, I often check the neighbor’s box.