“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Although my confidence had risen with the two out-of-body episodes, I felt that I was putting Seth and myself on the line with each test session. I never knew whether or not we would have an envelope test. Often I was afraid of having a session for fear we’d have an envelope test and the results just would not apply. (This never happened, incidentally, though the impressions given were not always as specific as we would have liked.) Actually I didn’t care what was in the envelopes—I just wanted to know if Seth could tell us, and I wanted him to be absolutely right each time. My attitude was bound to have an effect. Now I wonder that Seth was able to do anything with me at all in those days, but most of the time he managed to do very well indeed.

Knowing that Dr. Instream would be concentrating on each session put me under a strain, perhaps because of my own attitude. But now I felt that I really had to have a session each Monday and Wednesday evening, come hell or high water. And even when we were alone, which we usually were, I felt that the sessions were no longer private—that an invisible Dr. Instream was an audience. We seldom missed a session before the Instream tests. But now my idea of great defiance was to miss a session, to go out and get a beer and let the psychologist go stare at his old vase or ink spot or whatever he’d chosen for that night’s test.

Actually, I’m not sorry that we took so much time for the tests, but I’m glad we ended them when we did. I’m not temperamentally suited to putting myself under fire twice a week, which is what I was doing with the attitude I had at the time. Emotionally I disliked the tests; intellectually I thought them necessary. Seth didn’t seem to mind them at all, but I forced myself to go along because I thought I should. The fact remains that in our sessions the best instances of ESP have occurred spontaneously or in response to someone’s need, and not when we were trying to prove anything. I knew I was disappointed not to get some sort of “certificate of legitimacy” from Dr. Instream. On the other hand, we didn’t ask for one; we were too burned up not to have reports on the results.