“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.

(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.

(“I had the feeling that Seth was in this chute or tunnel, in miniature, and that he looked like he does in your portrait of him, only in full length.”¹

(“It’s all very distant now. I never saw the entire giant-sized figure of Seth. The head and the arms were clearest. The whole thing was an immeasurable distance from me.”

Each one is involved in its own context of reality, each one pursuing its own directions for its own purposes. One of those “Seths” was born in your space and time. That Seth then seeded himself, so to speak, in the space-time environment you recognize — appearing through the centuries, sending out offshoots of “himself,” exploring earthly experience and developing as well as he could those potentials of his own greater identity that could best be brought to fruition within a creature context.²

That one Seth was endowed with his own inner blueprint. The blueprint gave him an idea of his potentials, and how they could be best fulfilled in earthly terms.³

(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

(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.)

(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….”

(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.)

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.

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.

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.