“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.

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.

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?

Seth did say, however, that Rob’s picture using the color-building technique is a portrait of the artist in question. (See illustrated section.) He also said that Rob would do other paintings of both the artist and his environment, including possibly the artist’s studio.