“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Now your father paced himself unwisely. [...]

[...] A change in your father’s condition, in that the steadiness of his condition is not as you suppose. [...]

(At the time of this session Mother is visiting my brother Loren in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania for a couple of weeks, and cannot visit Father in the county home at Burlington, Pennsylvania.)

[...] Your father has been twice a male, successively. [...]

[...] I think my father was to give me the needle.

[...] At no time in the dream did I actually see my father; I merely knew he was there, and involved.

Primarily they refer to your own subconscious feelings toward your father. [...]

On this level therefore, the three most important of these dreams are related: the two regarding your brother, and the dream that had to do with execution by needle, a painless one, to be carried out by your father.

[...] You did indeed see your father (as my pendulum told me) not as a man who failed in several important areas, but as a failure in all areas: as a husband, breadwinner, father. (Pause.) You identified with him however out of fear of your mother’s emotionalism. [...]

(I now remembered father’s caps, once Seth mentioned them. But I felt somewhat in a dilemma, since father also wears regular hats.)

[...] This afternoon, incidentally, Jane and I spent in Sayre, visiting my father in the hospital, eating supper with mother, etc.

You identified with your father because he seemed free, in that she did not direct actively these strong affections toward him. [...]

(“The habit of squirreling away” is a good reference to my father, in whose photographic studio my brother Loren took the pictures he refers to in the test letter. The studio is in part of my father’s cellar; the rest of the cellar is stuffed and cluttered with odds and ends my father has accumulated over the years. [...]

Now your situation is not only entirely different but contrary, for to you a car represents, because of your father, an image on one hand of perfection. Your father insisted, because of his work with batteries, upon perfection. [...]

I am speaking of the relationship in your mind between your father and automobiles. [...]

[...] The car is also to him a complementary image of his father, who was always on the move, more so than most men, while his mother could not move at all. [...]

(“Out on the grass, I saw them: my deceased father and his mother. My father had also been 81 at the time of his death seven years ago. [...]

[...] My father and his mother were waiting for me. The strange thing was that Grandmother Butts looked considerably younger than her son, my father. [...]

In your terms, your father’s mother is ready to enter time again. Your father was pointing you out to her, and acquainting her with other such living members of the family as well, who are still in time. [...]

[...] I remember my father’s legs as he stood beside us. [...]

[...] “Turnabout with the child, a complete change of plan or a turnabout” refers to the fact that she wanted to keep the baby but its father refused to marry her and pushed her into having it adopted; she was a minor also at the time. 1947 is mentioned, the year she met the child’s father; the age 17 is mentioned; she was 17 when she met him: a school connection mentioned and she was still in school at the time.

[...] A man with a bristly mustache and short bristly hair was mentioned in the first part of the spontaneous session for which no notes were taken; this referred, Barb said, definitely to her father. [...]

[...] However her defense, which you recognize basically as insincere but superficially correct in this particular instance, was that your father hit her in the chest. You identified with your father, and could not permit, in this dream at any rate, an identification of this kind, since at this childish level you did not blame him and would have wished as a child, to have the power to do the same thing.

[...] Instead of having your mother say “He hit me in the chest,” and in order to punish yourself through your identification with your father, instead you translated the words to “He has a spot on his lungs,” therefore punishing symbolically both your father and yourself for the violence.

[...] The dream also allowed you to see ahead of time beyond the surface of the situation which did arrive on Sunday, and you were much easier on your father Sunday because the dream tipped you off as to the tactics that your mother would use on one level, and also allowed you to punish yourself and your father symbolically rather than actually, for a violent tendency which is now apparent in him toward her, but is not as readily apparent, but repressed, in yourself.

(After supper Jane had read the two dreams quoted previously involving my father. [...]

Your father dream. Your father represented your father, but he also stood for your version of the race [species] of man itself, of the nameless old men seemingly worn down by age, the lack of communication between nameless fathers and sons. [...] And as you consoled your father, you tried to console humanity. [...]

[...] I also mentioned my Boy Scout dream of May 22, in which I saw her walking normally, and my vivid dream impressions of my father, of May 15, in which I woke up crying. [...]

The withered foot (of my father) represented any and all deformities, and the great gap you felt existed between man’s ideal, and his actualization of it.

(“Why is my father so timid?”)

(“Can you tell us something about Jane’s father?”)

[...] She reborn too soon, chased after her father. [...]

(“Why did my father marry my mother?”)

[...] Your present father secretly admires Loren’s apparent easy sociability, not knowing that Loren is forced to laugh and shout loudly, just as your father is more or less forced by his own personality to sit silent and sullen.

[...] Father’s name was Throckmorton. [...]

[...] You had visited your father in his shop of machines of some sort. [...]

[...] As a matter of fact, at that same time your brother Loren was looking out of your father’s shop, and he saw nothing.

[...] My father was in the dream with me as I knew him in “real” life, and oddly enough he was about the same age as I was in the dream. [...] I can’t describe my father’s clothes. [...]

[...] At the time a trip to Florida would have been fine, although a meeting with Ruburt’s father on prolonged terms was not a good idea. Had you left Ruburt’s father for Miami you would have done well. Had you, Joseph, offered an alternative to going with Ruburt’s father, Ruburt would have accepted it and you would have done well.

Had you stayed any longer with Ruburt’s father the circumstances would have been tragic. A meeting would have occurred between Ruburt’s Mr. Burrell and Ruburt’s father in a bar in Marathon, in which Mr. Burrell would have fatally wounded Ruburt’s father.

[...] Jane’s father would have asked Mr. Burrell to go to the bar for drinks. The fight would have been started by Jane’s father. [...] Jane would have gone with her father, since I think this particular bar was only a short distance away.

[...] We spent some months at Marathon, in the Keys, with Jane’s father. [...]

The material I picked up about my father’s psychic intents was at first very bewildering. [...] For I glimpsed Robert Butts, Sr. as he decided to disperse “himself” into a series of other personalities in both the past and the near future, so that I wondered how — in that mélange of identities — my father could possibly know himself. [...]

[...] “Maybe Seth will talk about our own things instead of giving dictation — your material on your father [which I received this past Sunday evening], or what you got on your mother this afternoon. [...]

(Jane’s material on strands of consciousness² had actually developed because of my experience involving my father while I was in an altered state of consciousness. [...]

His experience appeared to imply that his father’s identity had so much mobility, and so many possibilities for development, that the very idea of identity seemed to lose its boundaries.⁴

Ruburt’s father always planned to make a new will before his death, and kept putting it off. In the dream Ruburt finds a strange mechanism made by his father that is supposed to dispense some money. A kindly old man appears, who says that Ruburt’s father made this contraption two hours before his death, to ensure Ruburt some inheritance.

[...] The old man also stands for Ruburt’s father, as Ruburt thought of him bumming around, frittering away his time and energy, so he was stealing from the pot. [...] (Pause.) The old man also stood for old man time in the dream, and reinstated the fact that an executor is important, for the old man also stood for —in the dream, now—Ruburt’s father acting as his own executor—meaning that his nature led him to leave ends loose.

[...] The odd mechanism represents the mechanics of the law, which his father used poorly, and in fact he died before he had time to make the contraption mentioned in the dream.

It was a legitimate experience in which you did attempt to find out where your father was going. The barrier was of your own construction, representing two things: the subconscious feeling that a definite barrier exists between one plane and another; and secondly the barrier you felt separated you and your father throughout his life.

[...] It was almost a nightmare—in fact Jane woke me out of it to prevent this seeming reaction on my part, I was fairly sure the dream concerned my father’s approaching death, but certain elements in it were similar enough to Seth’s suggestions about contacting Dr. Pietra, above, to make me tell Jane about it—on the off chance the dream had been more than it seemed.

[...] The thrashing around was something else again, and it represented your knowledge that your father would be born again. [...]

[...] He was urging you to help your father also. [...]

He only wrote to his father when he needed money as a child and adolescent, and he only called or contacted Fell, it seemed to him, when he wanted money. Fell was late on payments as his father had been late. He felt urgently dependent upon the checks as his mother had been toward welfare checks and the father’s payments.

Because of the temporary mother identification, he was open to the suggestion he had concerning his publisher, as the father of his book, you see. [...]

Your own attitude toward Frederick Fell, and your remarks to Ruburt, deeply frightened him, for they reinforced the nagging feeling that Fell would not do well by him as his father had not done well by his mother. [...]

Your father’s creativity, as mentioned [in earlier, unpublished sessions] had its side of secrecy, privacy and aloneness … you identified creatively with his private nature. [...] You believed the painting self had to be protected … as you felt that your father had to protect his creative self in the household …

Give us a moment … Your father’s inventiveness would also be used in the same manner, as source material, by whichever self you chose to become. [...]

(The visitation-from-his-father reference involves the material in the 100th and 101st sessions. Jimmy’s father died in the summer of 1964. Following the father’s death our landlord’s wife had several vivid experiences involving the deceased father; Seth said these were legitimate experiences involving contact with the father, and not dreams. [...] Perhaps she would receive and pass on to her husband any visitations from the dead father.

[...] Possibly he will have some kind of a visitation from his own father to warn him ahead of time.

I believe also a death of his wife’s father by next November.

7. And at various times through my early years, I understood how my mother used me (and my two brothers) as “weapons,” or tools or objects, against my father. “Weapons,” perhaps, is too strong a word, I think now, for I don’t remember my mother blatantly encouraging “her” children to defy their father. [...] As I grew up I came to feel that my father was both strongly surprised and disappointed by the wife and children he’d chosen to be involved with.

[...] But in certain terms she was the masculine center of the family, emotions or not, the aggressive one; and speaking conventionally now, your father (Robert Sr.) accepted the more passive creative role. [...] Your father would have been more “comfortable” as a woman, and she as a male. [...]

(6. At the same time, that paragraph contains very challenging ideas; they strongly remind me of the “Miriam” material I obtained about my father last week. [...]

(To me:) You viewed aspects — counterparts — of your father’s reality. [...]

[...] When you were attempting to take your father’s place, you used your talent as your mother wanted you to. She had no use for your father’s talent of inventiveness, because he did not use it to make money.

You were a commercial artist to make your mother happy, and to take your father’s place as breadwinner.

[...] Your father would not have worked as a photographer. [...]

Working as you have also rouses associations with your father. [...]