“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I was in for a surprise as the students discussed Seth’s remarks. One class member, a close friend whom I’ll call Peter Smith, is an artist and sculptor; after studying my Roman sketches, he had a note passed across the crowded room to me:)

(Peter’s statement was soon confirmed by another longtime friend of ours, Sue Watkins,¹² who also knows Peter well. He’d related the entire affair to her some months ago; his original perceptions had taken place over seven years ago, long before Sue had introduced him to Jane and me in 1973. Peter told me after class that my sketches had instantly rearoused his memories, although in his experience he’d seen the event from different angles. Yet, even with those discrepancies, and a few others, Peter believed that the walls in Jerusalem, the battlemented tower, the soldiers that I’d just described and depicted, were all the same as those he’d seen in his own visions of so much earlier.

(In the 724th session the following night, Seth remarked upon such circumstances, saying that while Peter and I weren’t counterparts, we’re “closely enough allied so that in certain terms you ‘share’ some of the same psychic memories, like cousins who speak about old dimly remembered brothers.”¹³

(In view of these two separate instances, involving Peter and Mary, I wonder: Aside from whatever intrinsic validity they may have, does each of us telepathically pick up on the experiences of others and weave such information into personal psychological dramas? If so, do we do this frequently, so that our private fantasies have an inner coherence with those of our fellow human beings — and connections with them — that quite escapes our usual notice?

(Our questions are without end, and Jane and I don’t really think many of them will be answered within our lifetimes. I’ll close this appendix with two more queries that psychically are much more personal and very intriguing: Had Peter Smith viewed the same events on that tower in Jerusalem from the vantage point of the soldier who killed my soldier? Were the slain and the slayer meeting now once more, under different circumstances?)

This isn’t the first time Peter Smith has been able to comment upon one of my Roman experiences from his own viewpoint. He’s traveled a good deal. In Chapter 4 of Politics, Jane described how Peter offered some interesting present-day “correlations” with portions of my third Roman, of the first century A.D. Peter’s information concerned the Spanish fishermen he saw hauling large nets ashore along certain beaches of the Mediterranean Sea; I’d seen similar actions during my internal perceptions that day.

13. Early in this appendix I wrote that I added these notes later, to give “ordinary background material” for my fourth Roman. So now, what do I make of the considerable similarities between my Jerusalem episode and Peter’s? Although his internal data reinforce mine to some extent, he can be no more specific about a physical location in the city for his visions than I can be for mine. (See Note 6.) I’ve also written about the conflicts involving authority that I believe my two Roman soldiers are expressing. Here I feel on more “solid ground” symbolically than physically. Just as I do, Peter rebels in his own peaceful ways against conventional authority, preferring to go his individual route in the arts, no matter how dubious his rewards may be.

To me, this fact alone lends a credence to his visions that bolsters my own in the most meaningful way: I think our tower experiences of so long ago (in terms of linear time), plus our mutual artistic backgrounds now, with their corresponding social implications, are too closely allied to be explained as “coincidence” in the objective fact world. Peter’s surprising material, then, helps me tentatively recognize the physical connections those motionless visions of mine may have in our space and time.