“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In ESP class last night Jane told all of her loyal students, some of whom have been with her almost from the time she began holding such meetings in the summer of 1967, that class was suspended until we’d moved into the hill house and settled down a bit — however long that might take.

(Jane and I were inside “our” hill house for only the second time this afternoon. Again we were accompanied by a real estate agent; because of insurance regulations we’re not allowed to have a key to the place yet, although we’ve been told that this dilemma will be resolved very soon. In the meantime I’ve begun what seems to be an awesome task: packing many of our possessions into an endless series of cartons that had once held things like wine, mayonnaise, cereal, pipe fittings, and so forth.

(Just before the session Jane began to edge into an altered state of consciousness other than the one she uses for her “Seth trance,” as she put it. For a few moments she sat quietly with her eyes closed. She felt “the idea, mentally, of something shaped like a television screen” off to her right. By now I was writing down what I could. “And now it’s coming closer. I don’t know what it is, or what it has to do with the session, if anything.” She paused, then resumed in the past tense: “It came up fairly close to me. I walked through it and down a long chute. There were coils in there. They did things with me — healing things — then dropped me back in my chair.

(“Then in the eyes of this Seth there are two little Seths looking out. Both of these images are like your portrait. Now they climb out of the eyes; with their bodies they make a garland around the big Seth’s head; they sit on it back-to-back like a pair of bookends.” Pause, eyes closed. “Wow — a whole bunch of these little Seths climb up on top of the giant head — but in perfect poses. They’re very stylized, but all real. And Seth will explain it,” Jane abruptly said, evidently quite surprised. “The little images face in all directions around the head of the big Seth. I know it’s not right, not a good analogy, but they’re like gargoyles on a steeple….

(Jane’s rather intent delivery had slowed noticeably during the last 10 minutes. “Boy,” she said, “I was getting stuff toward the end that neither of us — Seth or me — could verbalize. There wasn’t anything in my thought patterns that he could make words out of to express what he wanted to say. I vaguely felt it, but it was pretty alien to my psychological experience.” At the moment, at least, I couldn’t recall hearing her voice such ideas just that way before in the sessions.⁶

(Then: “Wait — I’m starting to get something on it,” Jane suddenly said. “He’s found something in my thought patterns he can use …” She sat with her head down. “I’m getting a whole lot of stuff now. I’m embarrassed to say it,” she laughed, “but I’ve got the feeling that if I rubbed right here between my eyes — you know, the third eye thing — I could get a lot more information….”⁷

(Jane didn’t rub between her eyes — and without leaving her chair she went back into the session within a very few minutes. Her eyes were closed. Her delivery was so subdued at first that I wondered if she was using her Seth voice. Resume at 10:15.)

(Now for a few moments Jane rubbed in a circular motion between her closed eyes.)

(10:36. “Wow,” Jane exclaimed as she emerged from her short but excellent delivery. “Before the session I didn’t feel a thing. I was just sort of happily dopey — no ideas at all. But I really clicked in before this break. Seth finally found something he could use to make analogies. I wasn’t aware of traffic noise or anything else … The whole thing surprises me: Look what I’d have missed if I’d decided not to have a session. And I didn’t know Seth was going to explain those visions until I got that flash from him just before he came through. I have the feeling that inside that experience I traveled a great distance….”

(Concerning Seth’s remark about “a simple move from one house to another” for Jane and me: This includes all of the other people involved, too. In the previous five sessions I’ve inserted just enough “house connections” to indicate what’s been materializing for us in this area, without digressing to write a much longer history. Our list of such interrelationships contains over 40 items so far, and continues to grow. However, many of these are made up of several related events, figures, et cetera, and so could be legitimately divided further if we chose to do so.¹¹

(Jane and I do not ascribe the elements making up our house adventures to that old catchall, “coincidence,” of course; at the same time we have no plans to statistically attempt anything with them either. So many variables are present that a separate analysis would be required for each individual involved — with “boundaries,” say, set as to the number of items to be considered in each case. Then what about temporal boundaries? Truly, for myself the whole house thing had its origins in my early childhood, over half a century ago. But Jane, being younger, would designate quite different limitations in time….

(“I’m just waiting,” Jane said finally, after we’d each had a little something to eat. “I feel unsettled. I think there’s another bunch of material there. Seth’s going to get it if I can do it — if he can find some more thought patterns he can use.” A long pause. “Now, I’ll try….”

(“A singular ‘its’ but a plural ‘infinities’?” I asked. Jane, as Seth, nodded in agreement.)

(11:29 P.M. “That’s as far as we can carry it tonight,” Jane said, meaning book material. She wasn’t so sure about ending the session itself: We sat waiting. Five minutes later she said: “Well, I guess that’s it,” and the session was over.)

1. See the picture section in Prentice-Hall’s editions of The Seth Material for a cropped, black-and-white reproduction of my oil portrait of Seth, “in the form in which he chose to appear to Rob,” as Jane wrote in Chapter 8 of that book. Seth first announced his presence by name in the 4th session for December 8, 1963; I painted him in 1966.

2. Quite a few of the diagrams I drew for Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness (which is to be published by Prentice-Hall in the spring of 1975) illuminate Seth’s material in this paragraph. See the opening notes for Session 718 of “Unknown” Reality.

6. But in appendixes 4 and 5 for Volume 1, see Jane’s own material on other-than-usual neurological pulses, or speeds. Seth examined our neurological pulses — and habits — at 12:19 in Session 686.

7. In all of the sessions, Jane has mentioned the third (or “back”) eye of occult lore only once before — in Session 612 for September 6, 1972 — and she’d been somewhat embarrassed then, too. See the opening excerpts from the 612th session in Appendix 19, with Note 5. In that note I speculated about “what intuitive knowledge she might possess that led her to talk about” the third eye at that time. We had the same questions all over again, without intending to investigate them any more now than we did then.

8. We think it quite likely that Seth’s material in this delivery, and some of Jane’s in Politics, grew out of reading we did earlier this month on “new” forms of mathematics — which embody some ideas that are actually many centuries old. Involved, however, are very interesting “nonstandard” methods of regarding time, quantum theory, the infinite and the infinitesimal in numbers, model theory, and other mathematical tools.

At least as she understands these concepts, Jane — and Seth — “took off” from them in individual, creative ways. For Chapter 19 of Politics (which is to be published in 1976) Jane transcribed from her library, in part: “If you imagine the official numbers 1 to 10 in a row, then there would be an infinite number of unofficial 1’s hidden in the 1 you saw, and an infinite number of spaces between the official 1 and 2. The position of the 1 on the paper would represent our sense-data world, while the invisible 1’s behind the official 1 would represent the official 1’s hidden values and infinite probabilities.”

In Note 1 for Session 739 I wrote that when Jane and I decided to buy the hill house (on February 21, 1975) we learned that the place next to it on the west would soon be for sale. I also commented that it would “be interesting to see what — if any — house connections develop.”

Not long after we moved into the hill house (in March) our new acquaintance and next door neighbor to the east, Frank Corio, told us he knows Louise Akins; she was one of the first students to attend Jane’s ESP class, in September 1967. An interesting tidbit, we thought, considering that Elmira is a city of close to 50,000 people, and in turn is surrounded by a similar number residing in smaller communities. I added Frank’s information to our list of house connections, then forgot about it.

Frank is also in real estate, although he has no professional associations with the Johnsons, Debbie, or the agency through which we bought the hill house. The house west of us became vacant this year in early summer. In the fall Frank Corio was given the job of selling the place, and soon did so — to a family, the Millers, who were moving to Elmira from a distant state. Next, Jane and I found out from Mrs. Miller that she too knows Louise Akins.

The odds against such a “coincidence” developing would be astronomical — except that the Millers had lived in a neighborhood close to the hill house several years ago (when the acquaintanceship with Louise Akins had been made), had moved out of state, then returned to buy the house next door to us. The house connection is still unique, however, considering that in the hill house Jane and I found ourselves bracketed east and west by people who knew one of her early students — who had in turn mentioned Jane to them. Interesting, that Frank Corio had been instrumental in bringing the Millers back to their favorite neighborhood, when in a city the size of Elmira there are at any time a number of homes for sale in “desirable” neighborhoods, including “ours.”

Jane and I certainly don’t think the fact that Frank and Mrs. Miller know Louise Akins was the reason the Millers moved next door to us, yet it is one factor to be considered among a myriad of others — money, availability, and so forth. Why did Jane and I move into a neighborhood in which such a house connection could develop to begin with? Why was Frank Corio assigned the task of selling the house next door to us? Why did the Millers encounter him at just that particular time, and why was he, of all the real estate agents in Elmira, the one who succeeded in selling them the house they bought?

In concluding this note, I should add that our neighbor, Frank Corio, was involved in other house connections with Jane and me — some of them quite as intriguing as the one just described.

12. Seth’s ideas in this paragraph and the one just preceding it are consistent with his material in a number of sessions for Volume 1. In sessions 681 and 684, for instance, he discussed the on-off fluctuations of our physical universe and everything within it, moment points, probabilities, Jane’s sensations of massiveness, the basic unpredictable motion of any wave or atom, and much more. In sessions 682–83, he stressed the nature of his CU’s, or units of consciousness. Then in Volume 2, Seth likened his own identity to that of a wave formation; see the excerpts from the 775th session in Appendix 18, with Note 35.

I also think his use of “great distance” this evening (just before 11:20) is somehow related to the feeling of “immeasurable distance” that Jane experienced in her vision as she sat for the session.

13. In retrospect we can see how the mystical Jane has always tried to intuitively penetrate the nature of reality through her art; I’ve illustrated that learning process by presenting selections from her early poetry at apropos times throughout the two volumes of “Unknown” Reality. I also gave some background information on Jane’s nature (with a poem) in Appendix 1 for Volume 1.

One of those steps in Jane’s self-directed search for understanding is referred to in Note 5 for Session 681 (in Volume 1), which contains three lines from her poem, More Than Men. She wrote it in 1954, when she was 25 years old. That was the year we married. The Seth material’s inception lay nine years ahead of us; neither of us knew what mediumship was. Yet, as Jane said recently: “It was there in the poetry all the time, only I didn’t understand.” Now I want to offer that poem in full.