“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

CHAPTER
EIGHT:

A Year of Testing—Seth
“Looks Into” Envelopes
and Gives Rob a Few Art Lessons

For the next eleven months, the Seth sessions dealt mainly with test data of one kind or another. At 9 P.M. as usual, Seth would begin with the theoretical material in which we were increasingly interested. At 10 P.M. he gave impressions for Dr. Instream, and after that Rob gave me an envelope if there was to be such a test that evening. If we did have one of our own tests, then we’d sit up after the session, trying to evaluate the results. By then it was usually past midnight, and we would be exhausted.

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.

In my studio was a pile of old newspapers. Most of them were of The New York Times, both daily and Sunday copies. Shortly before the session I removed a few local papers from the stack. Then backing up to the pile, I pulled out a section without looking at it, and tore off a portion of a page. I folded this behind me until I was sure it would fit between the regular double bristol and into the double envelopes.

Still without looking at the paper I’d chosen as object, I sealed it in the envelopes. Then, with my eyes closed, I picked up the section from which the object had been taken, groped over to a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and placed it on a high shelf where I would not see it.

This procedure left me knowing only one thing about the object: that it was from some section of The New York Times, date unknown. After the experiment was over, Jane opened the envelopes containing the test object; then I went back to the studio, and from the hidden section I picked out the page from which the object had been torn. It turned out to be pages 11—12 of Section One of the Times for Sunday, November 6, 1966.

“Something identical to something else … two or two of a kind.” (The word “twin” appears on the object, referring to the size of a blanket on sale. I had the strong subjective impression, however, that this was a reference to the fact that the envelope object was a part of a similar object.)

There were quite a few other surprises in this test. Not only did Seth pick up this excellent identifying information, but he gave further impressions concerning the whole page from which the test item had been taken. Besides all the sales, there were four articles on the large section. The envelope item didn’t include these, yet Seth gave impressions referring to three of them.

Seth also gave some other impressions of the page from which the envelope item was taken, besides those dealing with the articles. “A date above … Buttons … some figures and a distant connection with skull shapes … the colors, blue and purple and green … and other round shapes.”

This test brought several questions to mind at once, though. How had Seth picked up the information about the entire page, when only a small section of it was in the test envelope? Had some kind of projection on my part been involved, back to the studio bookcase? Seth hadn’t first given impressions of the envelope object itself, then neatly moved on to deal with the entire page; he had shifted back and forth between the two, as if viewing both at once. And why had he not confined his data just to the envelope object?

This test was funny, really, because Seth was doing beautifully on his own. Then he threw the ball to me, and I nearly fell flat on my face. The envelope item was a bill of Rob’s, dated July 15, 1966. The session was on August 1. I’d been with Rob at the lumberyard when he got the bill. (See the illustrated section).

We tried all sorts of things with the envelopes. In The New York Times test, Rob himself didn’t know what was on the test object. He didn’t always know what the test object was, in any case, and sometimes he didn’t even know that a test would be held! For example, occasionally friends would come unannounced to a session and bring their own test envelope. This was just handed to me in the middle of the session, without my knowing beforehand whether or not a test would be held. Sometimes Rob would use such an envelope at once; at other times he would save it for a future session.

It didn’t seem to make any difference in the results whether Rob knew what the test envelope contained or not. One night Nora Stevens (not her real name) came unannounced. She was the friend of a friend, and had attended two sessions previously. During this period we encouraged people to drop in with test envelopes, though actually few did. (Before and after this we preferred to keep our sessions private.)

We knew that Nora was a secretary in a hospital office that had to do with the purchase of drugs and supplies, but that she had nothing to do with patients, their records, or medical procedures. I didn’t know she’d brought an envelope. She slipped it to Rob after the session began.

After the session we opened the envelope. It contained a patient’s record sheet, a page from a pad that Nora had picked out of a wastebasket in another office. At the bottom corner were four numbers in a row, with other numbers on the top by the patient’s name, Margaret. Her hometown also began with an M; she was from out of town. A hospital stay is certainly unpleasant, often turbulent. Seth also gave other impressions concerning the woman’s background, but we couldn’t check these out.

I agreed with him. But after that, Rob often made up several test envelopes at once, shuffled them, and then chose one just before a session.

The overall results of our own envelope tests encouraged us to hope that Seth was doing fairly well on the regular Instream data, too. We started these with zeal and energy.

In any case, I always think of that “testing year” as beginning with the Gallaghers’ trip to Puerto Rico and ending with their Nassau trip. As far as we were concerned, Seth had proven himself. After a year’s work we wrote to Dr. Instream, ending the tests and giving our reasons. After a few more envelope tests, we ended those, too.

Though the sessions continued as usual, we found ourselves having other experiences then, like Rob’s visions, that also developed out of the Seth Material in one way or another. And as if to stress our new sense of freedom and further add to my confidence and training, Seth was to send me to California during a session, while he and Rob talked in the living room of our apartment in Elmira, New York. So much more fun than trying to tell the contents of sealed envelopes! This time complete strangers were involved in an experience that would really satisfy my seemingly endless search for proof after proof.