“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We started the Instream tests and our own envelope tests in August of 1965. In October my first book was coming out, and Peg Gallagher, a reporter for the Elmira Star Gazette, interviewed me. I’d known her slightly in the past, but now she and her husband and Rob and I became good friends. Bill is assistant advertising director of the Star Gazette, and he and Peg were soon leaving for a vacation in Puerto Rico. We decided to set up an experiment.

We wouldn’t communicate at all through usual means. Instead, we would ask Seth if he could “tune in” on the Gallaghers during their vacation. During their trip we would substitute this experiment for our envelope tests. We knew that Peg and Bill were going to San Juan, but that was all we knew. Besides, neither Rob nor I have ever been to Puerto Rico.

How much more fun this sort of thing was than the Instream tests, which we were also conducting! Even our own envelope series was dry in comparison. We mailed copies of the Gallagher material to Dr. Instream. I was really excited about the whole thing and waited eagerly for his comments. I took it for granted that he wouldn’t consider that we had any scientific evidence, but we did have the nearly identical sketches, and the impressions were correct. “He may not consider this scientific enough,” I said to Rob, “but he has to admit, at the very least, that clairvoyance occurred.”

We held seventy-five Instream tests and eighty-three envelope tests between August 1965 and September 1966. Like most people with no background in psychic work, I expected things to be pure and simple. If Seth was what he said he was, then he should be able to look into time and space and closed envelopes as easily as you and I can see the objects in a room. I didn’t realize how much depended on the depth of my trance and on my willingness to give him freedom—I had to learn not to “block” information that came through. I didn’t realize either that little is known about normal perception, much less extrasensory perception, or that no medium is expected to be 100 percent correct. The impressions had to come through me, and as the old saying goes, to err is human.

Yet Seth managed to use the tests to demonstrate his own clairvoyant ability, further my education, and instruct us on the processes involved. He varied the depth of my trances during tests so I could get the feel of various stages of consciousness, and also showed me how to let him use my own personal associations in order to get certain data. He used the tests to demonstrate ESP; but more, he gave me constant practice in changing my subjective focus, explaining the whole thing as he went along.

Usually no one was present at these sessions but Rob and I—hardly a scientific state of affairs. But with the envelope tests we weren’t trying to convince scientists or psychologists of anything. We were trying to see what we could and could not expect of the sessions. We wanted something we could check out for ourselves right away. I wanted to know how we were doing!

Sometimes Rob prepared the envelopes just before a session, and sometimes way ahead of time. He used all kinds of things for test items, some that I had seen, recently or in the past, and some that I had never seen. He might use a letter, for example, that had come the day before, and which I had read, or a bill from several years back, or an item he picked up that I had never seen, or an envelope prepared by a friend—in which case the contents were unknown even to Rob. Pieces of paper Rob picked up in the streets, leaves, beer coasters, chunks of hair, photographs, sketches, bills—all were used at one time or another. Sometimes Rob chose items specifically because they had strong emotional charges connected with them. Other times he purposely used neutral objects. We wanted to see if Seth did better with certain kinds of targets than others.

The items were enclosed in one sealed envelope between two layers of lightproof bristol cardboard, and then the whole thing was placed in another envelope, which was also sealed. I never knew when we would have such a test, and I never saw the envelope before a session. Rob would hand an envelope to me in the middle of a session. I was always in trance, and usually my eyes were closed. (In any case, the test item was enclosed within the two pieces of cardboard and two envelopes, and was quite opaque.) Sometimes I held the envelope to my forehead while delivering impressions. After the session we checked our results. (Specific examples will appear in the next chapter.)

Talk about a seesaw! When Seth did well on the tests, I felt light as a feather for days. When anything didn’t check out to my satisfaction, I felt as though I weighed 450 pounds and was gaining a pound an hour. I thought that anything less than a perfect performance cast doubts on Seth’s independent nature.

All in all our own tests proved invaluable, not only as a part of my training and as a means of increasing my self-confidence, but also in preparing me for some other out-of-body-experiences that would take place during later Seth sessions. The tests, and Seth’s comments, also gave us insights into the nature of inner perception that literally could not have been achieved in any other way.

Our own tests gave me a standard against which to measure my performance and Seth’s, providing an immediate check of accuracy and teaching me to sharpen my subjective focus to go from the general to the specific. All of this training was important as far as my reception of the Seth Material itself was concerned. Seth has often spoken about the necessary distortions that must occur in any such communications, and he is most concerned that the material be as little contaminated by distortions as possible. He discusses this thoroughly in later sessions.

I started the autumn of 1965, then, with high hopes, particularly because of the two out-of-body episodes mentioned earlier in this chapter. I waited to hear what Dr. Instream had to say about them. I was sure he’d have to admit that they were encouraging, even if they didn’t involve his own experiments with us. We’d already begun his series of tests and were sending the results to him each week. So far we’d heard nothing from him about these, and I also looked forward to see how we were doing here. If they turned out even half as good as the out-of-body data, I thought, we’d still be getting off to a great start.

Trying to prove the existence of telepathy and clairvoyance to a self-professed “hard-nosed psychologist,” sell fiction to one of the best magazines in the country, and conduct our own tests in the Seth sessions was rather a bit to take on in one year—as I discovered.