“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Before the session I showed Jane a childhood photograph of herself, and one of me. The two pictures are roughly the same size, about 3¼ by 5". They also look remarkably alike in their brittle and discolored condition — almost as though they’d been snapped at the same time — yet mine is older than Jane’s by 20 years.

(The photograph of me, taken and dated by my father [Robert Sr.], has been kept in one of the Butts family albums for 53 years. In it the time is June 1, 1921. I’m almost 2 years old. I have curly light-colored hair. I wear a one-piece suit, long white stockings, and black shoes. I stand in the side yard of the house my parents rented in Mansfield, a small college town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Perhaps a dozen chicks cluster in the grass at my feet while I stare down at them, quite entranced. In blurred focus behind me an unknown teen-age girl sits on a swing that’s suspended from a tree limb, and an empty wicker stroller-type carriage [mine?] stands beside her. Parked in a driveway in back of her is a four-door touring car with a fabric top. I might add that Mansfield is only 35 miles below Elmira, N.Y., where Jane and I live now.

(The photograph of Jane is 33 years old. It was taken by an older lady friend who was treating her to an outing at a spa just outside of the New York State resort of Saratoga Springs, where Jane lived with her bedridden mother, Marie, and a housekeeper. In a childish hand Jane had scrawled her friend’s name on the back of the picture, along with the date. Many years later she was to tell me, “My mother hated that woman.” In the snapshot it’s a sunlit day in August, 1941. Jane is 12 years old. She sits on the grass before some evergreen shrubs; she leans slightly back on her right hand, her bare legs rather primly folded. She wears a print dress that had been given to her in the Roman Catholic orphanage in Troy, some 35 miles from Saratoga Springs; she’d spent the previous 18 months there in the institution while her mother had been hospitalized in another city for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Jane also wears a short-sleeved pullover sweater. Her mother had knitted it during her stay in the hospital.

(Jane’s blond hair — which was to turn quite black — is neatly parted and combed, and she wears a barrette in it. Her face is youthfully round, but quite unsmiling. She’s not scowling. Rather, from her position on the grass she just stares directly out of the photograph at the viewer, displaying a sober, almost controlled regard that seems out of place for one of that age….

(To me, both photographs had a certain mysterious quality that I’d often found intriguing — an aura due partly to their being old, personal, and so irreplaceable, I suppose. But for a long time I’d been aware of other feelings connected with them. Jane had begun delivering the Seth material late in 1963, and soon afterwards Seth started developing his ideas on probabilities.¹ Many times while looking at the snapshots since then I’d found myself speculating about the probable realities surrounding their two young subjects. I told Jane now that I understood the course of action each of us had chosen to make physical, or “real” in our terms. But what of all the other paths our probable selves had embarked upon since those pictures had been taken? By now, did those photographs actually depict the immature images of us, the Jane and Rob we knew and had always been, or from our standpoint did they show a probable Jane, a probable Rob — two individuals who long ago had set out upon their own journeys through other realities? I wasn’t clear on what I wanted to know, and had trouble expressing myself to Jane. Maybe I just wanted Seth to comment on probabilities in a more personal way. [And added later: At the time, I had no idea that my questioning would trigger a new Seth book.²]

(As Seth, Jane briefly handled the two photographs I’d placed on the coffee table between us.)

The conditions, however, while “set” in one fashion, are highly plastic in another, so that a multitudinous variety of probable events can flow from them. Precognitively you are unconsciously quite aware — again in your terms — of the results of any given action or cause. When this (photograph) of Ruburt³ was taken, he had already become aware of the overall interests and concerns that would dominate his future life, although the particular course of it had not been chosen.

(I reminded her that I hoped Seth would comment on the old photograph of her in connection with probable realities, although now I could see that it would take him longer to develop answers than I’d thought it would. I didn’t think we’d get any material on my own picture tonight.

(As Seth, Jane pointed to the photograph of herself, taken when she was 12 years old.)

(Seth-Jane held up the photograph of me, taken when I was almost 2 years old. ⁹)

(After a pause at 12:02, Seth delivered a page of material for Jane before ending the session at 12:16 A.M. As I interpret his information on the photographs, then, Jane’s depicts an individual who was to become a probable Jane to the one I know, while mine is pretty much an early version of the self who’s always lived in this reality …)

5. See the notes about Jane and the photographs at the beginning of this session.

9. I described that childhood photograph of myself at the beginning of the session. My parents had three sons. As the oldest, I was born on June 20, 1919; next came Linden, 13 months later; the youngest, Richard, followed me by 9 years. (Both names have been changed.)