“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Here’s an instance where Rob was trying to test for clairvoyance rather than telepathy. Like many others, this test had surprising results. Rob’s notes show clearly the procedure he followed in choosing the test item:

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

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.)

Yet sometimes I’d get discouraged even over good results. One test had pleased me no end at first. It was our 37th, held in the 237th session on March 2, 1966. The target item was a print Rob had taken of his own hand a week earlier, when we were reading some books on palmistry. Seth’s impressions couldn’t have been more concise. I went around the house with a smile on my face just thinking of it for days afterward.

I was doing the dishes when a drawback suddenly occurred to me. Rob was in the living room. I went in. Slowly. “I bet Dr. Instream would throw out the results of that hand-print test because we both worked on palmistry the week before,” I said.

And what about the Instream tests? First of all, I kept waiting to hear what Dr. Instream thought about my two out-of-body episodes. And he simply never mentioned them. To me this was terribly disappointing. The results had checked out, whether or not they could be considered scientific. If these didn’t convince him that something was going on, I didn’t see what would!

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.

I didn’t feel this way in the beginning, but I was really furious that he didn’t tell us the results of the tests; all those hours seemed to be going down the drain. One night, really angry at not hearing from him, I did go with Rob to a nearby bar—only to rush home at the last minute so as not to miss the session!

He was obsessed with statistical proof for the existence of telepathy and clairvoyance, and hoped that we could produce it. At first it seemed tremendously exciting to me to be a part of such an endeavor. But as we continued to read everything we could get our hands on, excitement turned to bewilderment. As far as we could tell, the existence of telepathy and clairvoyance had been scientifically proven time and time again by Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University, and demonstrated by others such as Croisset, a psychic, working with Professor Wilem Tenhaeff at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. The work of Harold Sherman and other psychics certainly added circumstantial evidence at the very least. Was Instream throwing out all of these results and countless other evidence gained in parapsychology laboratories throughout the world?

Apparently he was. And our own results were presenting difficulties. Dr. Instream admitted that he didn’t know how to evaluate them statistically. A hit had to have so many known odds against it before it could be credited, and it was nearly impossible to set up odds against any particular statement made by Seth.

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.