“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Some quick figuring showed us that the 50’s for my mother had encompassed the years 1942–51. From my present viewpoint I had no idea if she’d consciously or unconsciously experienced any influx of energy resulting from the death of a probable self during that decade. In those days the Buttses didn’t think in such terms, for one thing; for another, I was absent from the family home in Sayre for much of that time. In 1947, for example, when my mother was 55 years old, I was 28 and living in New York City. I wasn’t to meet Jane for five years. And even if Stella Butts were still living, I think it would be difficult to question her about an event that would have taken place approximately a quarter of a century ago.

Give us a moment … The birth of Joseph took place at York Beach with the dancing episode,⁶ so you have in your own experience examples in adult life. I cannot give you everything in one evening, of course. A few glimpses before a word for Ruburt. Sportsmen make good money, so for this and other reasons you early turned to commercial art — a field in which artistic ability would be well paid for.

6. Jane covers our York Beach “dancing episode” in Chapter 2 of The Seth Material, and also quotes information Seth gave us on it in later sessions. The mystifying event took place during our vacation in York Beach, Maine, in August, 1963, a few months before Jane began to speak for Seth. At the time we understood little of what happened; yet the event represented a key episode at the very beginning of our psychic education; for in a crowded, smoky hotel barroom Jane and I unknowingly created physical “personality fragments” of ourselves — then came face to face with them. In the 9th session for December 18, 1963, Seth explained what we had been up to, and called our creations “fragments of our selves, thrown-off materializations of your own negative and aggressive feelings.” (Naturally, the more Seth told us about the human ability to generate such forms, the more questions we had!) In that 9th session Seth also used his term, “probable self,” for the first time.

I might add that if the York Beach adventure was a strong sign for us of psychic development to come (even if we weren’t able to interpret much of it at first), then Jane’s reception a month later of her manuscript, Idea Construction, was another; and that experience contained obvious psychic elements. See Note 7 for the last session.