“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“A date. Perhaps 1963, and a scroll of sorts.” We believe this data goes together, although there is a date, October 27,1966, on the object. The scroll we think of as symbolic of education or school. In 1963, Jane talked to a class conducted by Mr. Clauss, at Elmira College, subject poetry. The college connection arose recently, because Jane also applied for a teaching job there, as well as in the Elmira school system.

(The 75th envelope experiment used as object the employee record stub from Jane’s first check as a substitute high school teacher. Jane had of course seen it several times since receipt on October 28. The object is printed in black on green paper which contains a faint pattern. The green is itself a light tint. The large numeral in the upper right corner is in red. The back is blank. I placed the record between the usual double Bristols, then sealed it in double envelopes.

(Jane has called up the school board and taken her name off the list of teachers on call for substitute duty. Today, October 31.)

(“Connection with an encounter.” Jane said this is definitely a reference to her first day of teaching, October 11,1966. The object is from the paycheck for this day’s work. Jane said that although she liked teaching, the first encounter with a class is one to be remembered. She has had odd jobs teaching in the past, but never in a school system, in a formal classroom, etc.

[...] On March 25th, she recorded the 329th session, with the intent of playing the tape for her honors class in high school. [...]

(“Did anybody else at the school hear the tape beside the students? [...]

(“At school?”)

It was not played at the school for these people, I believe two men and a woman. [...]

(At 8:55 PM Jane had the impression of the name, Alice Prentice, as that of the deceased high-school classmate of mine, who was now dead, that I had helped astrally. [...] I may have some high-school material filed away, that can furnish data.

(“I had a grade-school teacher in Sayre, named Miss Lennon.”

[...] Upon reflection, and without checking records, I believe Miss Lennon could have been my teacher in junior high school, or perhaps when I was a freshman.)

[...] I graduated from high school in Sayre in June 1937, 32 years ago, and have seldom seen any classmates. [...]

Next, I was teaching school — not an unusual dream under the circumstances, since I was acting as a substitute teacher in the public schools that autumn.

[...] This was only my second time out as a substitute, and I never knew when I would be working until an hour or so before school began. Since I’d never been to this particular school, I left early.

[...] I knew she was a teacher, but hadn’t the foggiest idea in what school. [...] She didn’t know I was teaching and had just been transferred to this school.

[...] She was very embarrassed because she would not have time to give proper notice to the school or landlord. [...]

[...] 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.

1. Helen Bowman — Miss Bowman, my parents and I always called her — was my art teacher in the Sayre, Pennsylvania, high school from 1935 until my graduation in 1937. Through an arrangement with my mother, Stella Butts, Miss Bowman loaned me the money to attend commercial art school in New York City from 1939 to 1941. [...]

Education in your culture is a mixed bag (with ironic and humorous emphasis) — and education comes not from schools alone, but from newspapers and television, magazines and books, from art and from culture’s own feedback. [...]

[...] You did that apart from what you had to do in school as a boy. [...]

(To me.) You have helped two people who were in school with you. [...]

(I graduated from high school in Sayre, Pennsylvania, in 1937, and believe Dave Lake did so a year later. [...]

(“Can you give me a clue as to the other person I helped, who was in school with me?”)

(Jane said she thought the other person I had helped astrally, from high-school days, was dead. [...]

[...] A mother might say: “You don’t need to have a temperature in order to avoid school, or as a way of getting love and attention, for I love you in any case. And if there is a problem at school, we can work it out together, so you don’t have to make yourself ill.” [...]

Children, however, may be quite conscious of the fact that they willed themselves to become ill, in order to avoid school, or an examination, or a coming feared family event. [...]

[...] All of us went through grade school and high school in Sayre, a railroad town in northeastern Pennsylvania: Our father settled his family there in 1923 when he opened an auto-repair and battery shop. The separations in the family began to happen after Linden and I graduated from high school, left Sayre, and started to work our respective ways through college and an art school. [...]

[...] At his preference and demand, he changed from a public to a Catholic school after the third grade.⁴ This was against his mother’s judgment. She felt that public schools were better and more socially beneficial. Ruburt, at that age — when he changed at the third grade — had quite a will then, in that he forced his mother to acquiesce to the change of schools. [...]

[...] In such an eventuality, fragmentation occurred so that the abilities were dispersed, some directed into school, some into drawing, and others into his models. [...]

[...] Thus, Jane was 9 years old in 1938, when she changed schools after finishing the third grade.

One believes that the conscious mind and the intellect have all the answers, but to this school this means that the conscious mind is analytical above all, and that it can find all the answers through reason alone. The other school believes that the answers are in feelings and emotion. [...]

As mentioned earlier (in the 621st session in Chapter Four) there are, simply speaking, two schools of thought in current favor.

Neither school understands the flexibility and the possibilities that are inherent within the conscious mind, and mankind has barely begun to use its potentials.

[...] The old man and the school of spiritualism. Letter on school notepaper—palsied and hard to read. [...]

(I remember Doc Kiley best from my grade school days, just as I do his sister Helen. I didn’t see as much of them by the time I was in high school, then college. [...]

(I then spoke to Nan Zeizing, a girl I had gone to high school with. [...]

[...] The poor lunches on nursery school days were the result of resentment because of the school hours.

The vacation falling between and breaking up, you see, the nursery school pattern and the remainder of the summer, will be most beneficial. [...]

Schools require a large body of knowledge already accumulated, of course, so to the early species schools as such were meaningless. [...]

[...] To a large extent the young species relied on dreams to teach them all they needed to know, just as in your time people rely on schools instead. [...]

[...] She is a teacher in a Boston high school and has taken the tape to school; when she sends a transcript of the session it will be given below.

(The balance of the session was material Seth delivered to be played for Pat’s high-school class of exceptional students, and is, we think, excellent. [...]

[...] Jane believes it refers to her recurring playground dream, and the fact that her school was directly across the street from the site of her dream. [...] on page 157, describing the physical relation between the school, the priests’ home quarters, and the playground. [...] A high fence surrounded the block-size playground, with the two entrances on an opposite side and end from the school; hence a child to reach the school from the playground had to travel at least one full block, and possibly two.

[...] The playground is directly across the street from the Catholic school Jane attended. The school was actually housed in a complex of buildings that contained also a church and the headquarters and living area of the particular priestly order serving Saratoga and environs.

The nursery school was at the time the only move he felt really open to him. [...] Nursery school seemed to offer a compromise between your idea of a regular job, and his own dislike of one. [...]

(Last Saturday morning, June 10, 1 offered to take Jane to the 20th reunion of her high school class in Saratoga. [...]

[...] I remember very well doing that on certain occasions—usually to avoid some school activity—and that even then I was surprised because my parents didn’t catch on to what I was up to. [...]

[...] “I know that sometimes I made myself sick to get out of stuff like diagramming sentences and doing multiplication tables, in Catholic grade school. [...]

We were a bit surprised, then, to realize that for both of us at least some of our “willful” experiences had revolved around our early school days.

(“Did the nursery school job contribute to the symptoms?”)

The symptoms became aggravated again after he signed up for next year’s work schedule at nursery school. [...]

(“Should he consider going back to nursery school next year?”)

(“Is it okay to let the nursery school job for next fall, and the contract, ride for now?”)

[...] They often unite conflicting schools of thought into a more or less unifying structure. [...] In most cases, for instance, your hospitals, schools, and religions, as organizations, are initiated by and frequently maintained by this group.

[...] They are behind art schools, for instance, though they may not be artists themselves. [...]

[...] They usually set up fairly stable, fairly reasonable governments, schools, fraternities, although they do not initiate the ideas behind those structures.