“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

The above impressions referred to the test object itself. Now here are some about the page from which the object was taken. Seth said, in consecutive order: “A method of disposal … Something in the vernacular … Gubatorial.” (I was after the word “gubernatorial” here, but as usual Rob recorded it the way I pronounced it in trance.)

For a minute this data stumped us when we went over the test results. Then Rob looked at the full newspaper page.

“And look at this,” Rob said, holding up the item in one hand and the full page in the other.

“ ‘Election Day Sales,’ or ‘Values,’ is printed in black headlines at the top of both sides of the page. And gubatorial, or gubernatorial, applies because the election’s for New York State governor on November 9. I’d also say that the phrase ‘Election Day Sales’ is certainly in the vernacular.”

Refer to the illustrated section for reproductions of the test item and the page from which it was torn. Both sides of the test item contained portions of advertisements that were tied in with election day, yet the words “Election Day” didn’t appear on the object itself at all—only on the whole newspaper page that had lain on a high shelf of Rob’s studio bookcase.

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.”

The date of the paper was at the top of the page, of course. Buttons, many of them, are clearly shown in the photographs of clothing for sale. These same models are also the figures Seth mentions, and as you can see from the photograph of the page, the women’s faces give a skull-like impression, with their hair pulled back. The colors mentioned by Seth are listed in the sheet advertisement. Purple, I believe, refers to “Orchid mist.”

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?

We asked Seth about these points in a later session, and got some very interesting answers: “A portion is always connected to the whole of which it is part,” he said. “From the torn section, then, to me the whole [page] was present, and from portions of the whole, the whole can be read. With enough freedom on the one hand, and training on the other, Ruburt, speaking for me, could give you the entire copy of The New York Times from a torn corner.

Seth said: “A connection with a family record, as a page, for example, from a book … connected also with a turbulent event or unpleasantness … four numbers in a row, and other numbers, the initial M, a connection with another city.”

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.