Two Interesting Articles about Jane and Seth

Hi folks! I know in my previous post I said I’d be taking a break from posting, but in sifting through Mary’s materials I recently came across some old newspaper articles I thought two were especially interesting. They were pulled together (date unknown) by Michael Santone, who was an ESP class member. Michael can be seen in the soundless Jane/Seth video at about 1:19—the man with a mustache per Mary’s notes. I’ve searched for Michael but have not been able to find much additional information about him other than he moved to Japan in 1980. He was on Mary’s interview “to-do” list. 

The two articles below were written by Peg Gallagher who, along with her husband Bill, became close friends with Jane and Rob.

The first article is from the January 21, 1973 Elmira Sunday Telegram. I thought you would enjoy it because it is rather biographical. There were also some images from the article in Mary’s files, which I’ve included here. Click on the images for a larger view.

The photos in the collage of Jane talking were taken by Peg for the article. Mary had a few better-quality versions of three of them so I patched them in.

The content of both articles is below, but since these are long, I’m also attaching them as PDFs so you can download and print or read offline.

Here’s the PDF of the 1973 article. Note: I “scanned-to-type” the articles and then proofread to clean up the formatting and any errors caused in the process. Sorry if I missed anything!

The second article is an excerpt from the February 2, 1969 Elmira Sunday Telegram. It caught my attention because it says that Tam Mossman asked for psychological assessments of Jane/Seth in order to persuade Prentice Hall to publish materials written with a “disembodied co-author.” It mentions there were two parapsychologists that gave input, but only names one, Eugene Bernard. Gene and his wife are mentioned in The Early Sessions Vol. 7 (Session 303, 11/26/66 held for the Bernards) and The Early Sessions Vol. 8 (Session 362, 9/11/67, mentions Session 303).

Here’s a PDF of the 1969 excerpt for your reading convenience.

– – – – – JANUARY 21, 1973 (FIRST ARTICLE CONTENTS)

Sunday Telegram, Elmira NY January 21, 1973

Jane Butts Explores Another World by Peg Gallagher

Parts of her early life read like a bad novel. As a novelist herself, she’s the first to admit it. 

But now—after years of involvement with psychic phenomenon—Jane Roberts Butts has a new view on her background. 

Now she feels that she created it herself; that in a previous existence, she chose it for her own particular reasons; that it formed a rich bed of experience to be used positively in her life.

So now, without any qualms, she can sit back and reflect on her background and see:

Little Janie Roberts alone, placed in an orphanage, her parents divorced… little Jane at home cooking, scrubbing, caring for her invalid mother… Jane, with moments of terror as her mother threatens to commit suicide…. and Jane, grown up, running away.

It won’t do as a novel, obviously. It does, however, make the plot of an autobiography, one that is called “From This Rich Bed.”

For Mrs. Butts, the book is a means of illustrating one of her beliefs – that the past is still living and incomplete, that today and yesterday interact and change in a present that unites them both.

Balderdash, you say?

Or just, oh crap?

Go ahead and say it if you feel like it?

Jane Butts would, even it if shattered your image of a medium as elite, aloof and intellectual.

But then she might proceed to convince you—as she has a way of doing—that her ideas are worth exploring.

Most of her “convincing” is done through her books. She is the author of three on extrasensory perception.

Her latest—”Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul”—was written by a personality called Seth, who speaks through Mrs. Butts while she is in a trance state.

Seth, who is gaining a following of his own in ESP circles, is presently in the process of dictating another book which will tell how to apply his ideas to daily life.

Seth’s first book, which came out last fall, has been selling briskly, as has the paperback of “The Seth Material,” which also came out in the fall.

“The Seth Material,” first published in 1969 as a hardcover, was Mrs. Butts’ presentation of material given by Seth while Mrs. Butts was in trance state, in twice-weekly sessions held over a five-year period.

The sessions are still going on. In addition, Seth has been dictating his books.

Unlike Mrs. Butts, Seth starts with the title. He’s calling his second book “The Nature of Personal Reality” and he had this to say about it:

“I am writing this book to help each individual solve his own personal problems. I hope to do this by showing you exactly the way in which you form your own reality, by examining the ways in which you can alter it to your advantage.”

A brief note for scoffers who are sure that Mrs. Butts, herself is writing the Seth books:

Their methods of writing are completely dissimilar. Mrs. Butts will write a first draft, rewrite, polish and change. A chapter may be rewritten several times.

Seth, on the other hand, will start by dictating a chapter heading and proceed smoothly from there, seldom changing a word.

The Seth material is taken down by Mrs. Butts’ husband, Robert F. Butts, an artist and a partner in the ESP exploration, who has had his own psychic experiences. These have affected his paintings to the extent that many of the portraits he does are the result of psychic images that he receives.

Mrs. Butts “met” Seth soon after beginning her experiments with ESP, about eight years ago. Until then, she had only a sketchy knowledge of the field. Now, however, she can see some clues to her involvement.

As she explores these clues, she is also moving toward a new phase of her writing career. She has decided that while she will continue her work in the psychic field—and while, no doubt, Seth will continue his books—her writing will be devoted to fiction, poetry and other areas that she considers more creative.

Seth in a sense has solved what has long been a personal conflict for her. With his books, Seth can continue to provide the psychic material that she feels is desperately needed today.

At the same time, Jane can continue with the creative writing and poetry that she has felt from childhood is her reason for existence.

A native of Saratoga, N.Y., she has been writing as long as she can remember. She can still recite a poem that she wrote when she was five.*

Even then, she knew she was going to be a writer. And later in her childhood when people would comment that she was going to be a writer when she grew up, she remembers replying loftily: “I am one already.”

While her childhood was a difficult one, there were also many happy moments and exciting times that were out of the reach of the average young person.

Saratoga was then—as it still is—a center of the arts, and as a teenager Jane managed to move in almost hallowed creative circles. A well-known writer of the time, Caroline Slade, took her under her wing, and she remembers being at parties attended by poets Louis Untermeyer and Adrienne Rich.

She recalls her meetings and arguments with actor Monte Wooley, whose sarcastic wit, was often turned on those who simply approached to ask for an autograph.

“He was a bastard … rude, awful. I remember arguing with him about poetry and he said something like, “young, whippersnappers who want to write ought to at least get their poets straight,” Jane recalled.

“So I went home and checked. He was wrong and I was delighted to let him know about it.”

When she was even younger, she remembers taking sheathes of poetry to YADDO, a center for creative writers in Saratoga.

“I’d knock at the back door and ask if there was a poet who would read my poetry because it was really good. They’d take it but I’d never hear from them… they’d give me a piece of cake.”

She also remembers one of Caroline Slade’s cocktail parties that was filled with writers and poets. She had egg nog, which struck her as “a silly thing to serve at a cocktail party.”

“I didn’t know it had liquor in it. I had two and I was feeling great. I asked Untermeyer to read some of my poetry—which I had with me, naturally—and he said he was too busy.”

Others would try to brush her aspirations aside by telling her that she would forget poetry and writing when she grew up, got married and had a family.

“I’d tell them that they were wrong. Even then, I knew that I didn’t want to have children, that I wanted to devote my life to what I considered my work—and that, for me, was the most important thing in the world.”

The brush-offs didn’t deter her. Criticism of her poems only made her furious. It wasn’t until later that she developed a more critical attitude toward her work.

“I figured I could do it and they couldn’t, so who were they to tell me it wasn’t right—and, now I think that’s as important as hell. I think you have to have that if you’re going to write, as a child at least, to give you confidence… when you do get critical about your work, you have to have a backlog of trust to build on.

“When you’re starting you have to have confidence in yourself. Otherwise, at the first adult criticism, you’d drop the whole thing.

“Now I realize that some things you do are very good and there are some things you don’t succeed at. I suppose I’m my own best critic—or worst.”

Jane also read her poems to the nuns and priests “as long as they’d listen.” But, in spite of her brashness, she was always afraid of being shut off. Now she knows that she often used her poetry as a shield from her own insecurity.

“I always had a paper and pencil in my pocket and in a situation where I felt embarrassed or afraid or insecure, I’d whip them out and start writing a poem. Then people would leave me alone—which was what I wanted.”

It is easy for her to remember her happiest moments as a child.

“It was when I was sitting on the back porch writing poetry. It wasn’t terribly private, but to me, it was. I used to feel incredibly safe… and I also felt that it was filled with the magic voice of nature.”

“I thought if you sat and listened long enough, you’d pick up secrets from it. I had a mystical idea of nature. I think kids do – although they don’t use those words. I think children are really mystical in the honest, bedrock way that makes them feel that they really do belong to the universe and are a part of it.”

Her unhappiest moment was more difficult to pinpoint—not because there weren’t many but because she had to take a few minutes to “pick and choose.”

It happened when she was about six. Her grandmother had died and her mother was sick so she was sent to a girls’ camp. As the only Catholic in the camp, she refused to eat meat on Friday.

“The woman was furious. She got out the Bible and said to show her where it says that you can’t eat meat. I couldn’t read the Bible to start with… I could barely read….

I thought surely God was going to do something to help me out at that point and He didn’t… so I was sent away from the table in disgrace and ridiculed.”

According to the rules of camp, she was allowed to go to church on Sunday. She was to be picked up after Mass. But she left church before the service ended and ran home.

She has little to say about the later period—through the fourth and part of the fifth grade—which she spent in an orphanage.

She doesn’t remember being particularly unhappy there—but she can tell some amusing stories about it that make you wonder why she wasn’t.

It was a Catholic institution that helped to further reinforce the strict dogma that had been instilled throughout her childhood—and which was later to be dropped.

“I left the Catholic Church and all organized religion simply because I didn’t believe their picture of reality. The nature of reality as explained to me by the church at that time never made any sense,” she says now.

She returned home but life was increasingly difficult. She can joke about it now: “I had this lovely, ideal childhood… (Don’t put that in… that’s a lie…).”

Then more seriously: “It was a relatively difficult childhood… more difficult than many but plenty of people have had it worse. My mother was an invalid so I had lots of work to do. We had housekeepers at various times because she needed constant care.

“She was a very intelligent woman. She encouraged my writing. Though it was a poor background financially, it wasn’t culturally deprived.”

She lived in a strong Irish Catholic neighborhood that she remembers as being “inbred and yet loaded with its own kind of vitality that in its own way was great.”

As Jane explains it in her autobiography, drama whirled about them. Nothing was simple or what it appeared to be. A thunderstorm was not just a thunderstorm, for example. It was a potential disaster sent by the devil to destroy them. It was a contest between good and evil.

The neighborhood was filled with superstition. But although Jane no longer believes that storms are caused by gods or devils, in some strange way she prefers the earlier conception to the more scientific one held by most of her contemporaries.

She explains it this way:

“I think we are connected with the universe. Chemicals and elements pass through us and back into the world that we know. As our emotions change, the chemicals are altered as they are invisibly released into the atmosphere, so I think that physical storms are the exterior face of our inner ones.”

Her relationship with her mother was not a good one.

“My mother was a strong, domineering woman, probably scared to death of the position she found herself in. She was psychotic, attempting suicide several times and scaring the devil out of me as a kid with threats… which she never carried out but which were frightening none-the-less.”

Her early life was one of cooking, cleaning, getting up in the middle of the night to put more fuel on for the stove and to bring her bedridden mother the bedpan.

Jane’s parents, who are both dead now, were divorced when she was about three. Soon after, her mother began to deteriorate physically with an arthritic condition. She became completely bedridden when Jane was about six.

Jane remembers the moment it happened.

Her mother and her grandfather had frequent arguments about moving. Being part Indian, he talked about the house being unhealthy because the wind couldn’t blow through it. He urged Mrs. Roberts to take Jane and move. But she refused.

“Finally, I remember they had this fantastic argument and grandfather had the gas and lights turned off and moved out every stick of furniture, except a little doll bureau that he had made for me.

“It was his furniture and this was his way of saying, if you won’t move, I’ll make you do it.

“Mother went next door immediately, had a terrible attack, called the doctor, who gave her a shot for pain—and from that moment, she never walked again.”

But the battle between the two strong personalities did not end there. Mrs. Roberts bought back the same furniture and stayed in the house.

Mrs. Roberts had strange ways of disciplining her daughter. At times, she would threaten suicide. At other times, she would tell Jane that she really could walk and during the night she was going to get up, turn on the gas jets and kill them both.

“I would be absolutely terrified. I’d lay there in the night and if I heard the lightest sound I’d say, she can’t walk… but then suppose she really can, and she turns those gas jets on…?”

Now Jane feels that her mother felt that she couldn’t discipline her strongly enough through corporal punishment or that she was panicky over her condition and couldn’t react in a normal fashion.

But she does not feel that it was childhood imagination.

“All I know is that I have a bunch of crucifixes and medals arranged on my pillow in a certain way and they were to protect me from all these things. If I awoke in the morning and one thing was out of place, I’d feel the protection wasn’t right…

“And yet, my mother would tell me that she loved me and that I was a good kid and she didn’t know why she acted that way… but then she’d do it again.”

The tense situation continued but Jane kept on writing and in high school in 1947, she won honorary mention in a poetry contest sponsored by Scholastic Magazine. As a result she was awarded a scholarship to Skidmore College in Saratoga.

Jane left home a month after her 21st birthday. Her mother had attempted suicide twice that year and threatened it numerous other times. She remembers one last attempt.

“She told me she had taken phenobarbitol but she would always yell and scream and pretend to stop breathing so I thought she was faking again because I had told her I was leaving.”

When it became apparent that she had taken a drug, Jane asked a roomer who was staying in the house to help hold her mother while she called the doctor. He refused. The doctor also refused to come but called an ambulance.

“The next afternoon—the minute I found out she was going to live—I left home,” Jane said.

Her mother was placed in a nursing home where she could get the constant care that she needed and Jane went to California to visit her father. She returned several months later and took a variety of jobs, including one as society editor of The Saratogian and another as a supervisor in a radio factory.

Then in 1954 she met Robert F. Butts, an artist who was working on the Mike Hammer comic strip with a friend of hers.

She still has a box that he gave her, filled with artists’ erasers, on which he had written: “Make a galaxy, Jane.”

“I understood it without knowing what it meant intellectually… something like, use your creativity to form a different kind of reality. In a way, I’m still doing it.”

They were married two months later in December 1954.

“We were deeply in love. But besides that, we both knew we wanted to devote our whole lives to our work—he to painting and me to writing—no matter where it led or whether or not we were successful.”

For a time, they lived near New York City, where he continued working in the lucrative comic strip field, producing such strips as Capt. Marvel and Wonder Woman.

Then they moved to Sayre, Bob’s hometown, and for a time they both held part-time jobs so that they could spend most of their time writing and painting.

They came to Elmira in 1960.

Jane worked for a time at the Arnot Art Museum and until last year, Bob worked part-time in the art department at Artistic Card Co.

Jane had started writing science fiction after their marriage. By the time they came to Elmira, she had published extensively in science fiction and poetry magazines. Soon after, her novel, “The Rebellers,” was published in paperback.

Those who have already read about her know how she became involved in psychic experiments. Her husband suggested that she write a book on extrasensory perception.

The idea was for someone without background in the field to experiment and see what could be done. She sent an outline to publisher Frederick Fell Inc. and the idea for a do-it-yourself ESP book was accepted.

“How To Develop Your ESP Powers” was published in 1965.

The experiments began with the ouija board. This was soon dropped when Mrs. Butts began anticipating messages and knew beforehand what the board was going to spell.

Then on December 8, 1963, Seth introduced himself, speaking in his booming voice through Mrs. Butts as she sat in a trance.

All that now seems in the distant past as the Butts now have about 50 volumes of material on such a wide range of topics as the nature of physical matter, dreams, life after death, reincarnation, the God concept, and the nature and meaning of reality and existence.

Their work in the psychic field has brought immense changes in their lives and ideas. It has also brought its stresses and strains.

Psychologists have come to explore Jane’s work in such areas as out-of-body travel or astral projection. Scientists have expressed interest in a wide variety of Seth’s data which includes material on the system of probabilities, the inverted time system, quasars and pulsars and the nature of the expanding universe.

But the most serious problem that has developed involves the numerous individuals who have desperately sought help on a wide range of personal problems.

They are beyond the scope of one person to handle—and Jane is finally and firmly accepting this. She had always felt that she could help others best through her writing. And, besides, she feels that real help must come from one’s self.

“You might get some understanding or clues but you’ve got to do it alone. The process of learning to solve your problems is invaluable.

“Many people use psychics in general as a crutch. If you allow people to do that, you’re not helping them, you’re hindering them – and putting impossible burdens on yourself.”

She feels that her psychic books have helped people tremendously and this, she feels – and Seth assures her – ends her responsibility.

“Also, it’s as egotistical as hell to think that you’re the only one who can help them — when actually you are depriving them of learning how to use their own great healing energy.”

Her way of continuing to help on a more personal basis is her weekly psychic classes in which they “try to explore the nature of our consciousness, get beyond stereotypes, view reality from different angles and enrich daily experiences.”

Jane’s own psychic experiments have continued and her most fruitful one involves her new novel, slated for publication in the spring or fall.

The term “novel” itself excites her—since she’s had to drop that area in recent years to produce her psychic books. But in a sense, the book is a fascinating marriage of the two fields since many of Seth’s psychic ideas are incorporated in the fiction.

The novel, entitled “The Education of Oversoul Seven,” is the beginning of a new direction that she hopes to pursue.

“What I want in the future is to combine my psychic and creative abilities and to show the human personality in its real richness, not just as it is focused toward the environment… through fiction, with stress on dreams and out-of-body experiences, to show the personality with all of its inherent magic.”

She feels that its just a matter of “being aware”.

The entire “Oversoul Seven” emerged from a dream. She records all of her dreams and the entry for that day reads:

“I had this incredible dream last night. It was really odd. I know this is significant though what it is, I don’t know. I had a series of dream experiences These were exuberant, filled with spontaneity and freedom and perhaps highly symbolic.” 

The next day she got the first lines to “Oversoul Seven” and she instantly connected it with the dream.

“The whole book flowed out of those lines almost automatically and the first draft of the entire novel was completed in three months,” she said.

The novel is built on the concept that all time exists simultaneously and each soul has various lives that appear to happen in different times, yet interact upon each other.

The main character, called Oversoul Seven, is learning to understand and apply this principle to the various personalities whose lives range from the period 3500 B.C. to present time.

Those who have not met Jane are sometimes surprised that she does not fit an anticipated image.

Small wonder—if they expect to see an occult figure floating about in a darkened room, speculating loftily on matters of a highly spiritual and ethereal nature.

Instead, they see a small dark-haired energetic women, usually wearing jeans, in a bright, cheerful double apartment, filled with books and plants.

“Occult” and “spiritual” are terms she would just as soon divorce her work from. And to conduct any type experiment in a darkened room would strike her as ludicrous.

Said one woman after her first meeting:

“I expected to find some kind of weirdo, at least wearing hippie clothes, who would be hard to talk to. But she was quiet… I thought she was very intelligent—and she talked more about what I was doing than about herself.”

However, “quiet” would not be a term normally applied to Jane. She likes to talk. She also likes to listen. She has a quick mind that delves flashingly into the most intimidating subject with a “hell, why not?” attitude.

But she herself is not intimidating conversationally, contrary to what some may expect. She doesn’t expect everyone to understand her field—nor does she expect to spend all of her time explaining it.

Besides, she’d just as soon talk about something else. She doesn’t mind explaining certain phenomena — but she also doesn’t enjoy being cornered at a party by someone bound and determined to disprove ideas with which they’re not all that familiar.

Her work has brought some interesting contacts, some of which have developed into warm friendships. The most recent was with Richard Bach, author of the best-selling “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” The meeting led to mention of Mrs. Butts and her works in the recent Time magazine cover story on Bach. And Bach’s description of her in the article also brought her smack into conflict with some of her own personal beliefs.

But to start at the beginning, Bach came to Elmira recently to visit Jane because he was still pondering the source of his novel, whose plot had come to him in a manner which he was unable to explain to his own satisfaction.

Bach’s book—which has become the hottest thing to hit the book racks since “Love Story”—began when he was walking near a beach and heard a voice say, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”.

It meant nothing to him but soon he began to get images that told the story of a seagull who loved to fly and who ascended into new levels of consciousness as his learning progressed.

The whole experience puzzled Bach. Even though he was by then basking in new-found fortunes, he was concerned about how he had gotten the material. Then he read Jane’s book and thought perhaps she could enlighten him.

Bach has since mentioned Jane’s book in public appearances and on television and also to the Time reporter who interviewed him.

But when the Time article appeared, Jane admits to being disconcerted at Bach’s description of her as a “middle-aged woman in a rocking chair”. Her friend, Dick Bach!

“I hadn’t thought of myself as middle-aged yet and I was annoyed… enraged!—to my own amusement—because I really do believe that age is meaningless and here I was with that reaction!”

This led directly to a series of poems called “Dialogues Between the Soul and Mortal Self in Time,” which attempts to answer some questions related to her reaction.

The mortal self asks questions on such matters as life and death, and the soul replies. The series, still incomplete, seems to be headed toward book form.

“It not only resolved the problem beautifully but I feel that it was highly constructive because it led me to remember the gap that can exist between theory and experience,” Jane said.

She sent copies of the poem to Bach, and also to Timothy Foote, head of the Time magazine book department, who came to visit her after talking to Bach.

In a sense, Jane feels that she is almost starting a new career in returning more heavily to fiction.

Through the work that she is doing, she has gained more personal insights and a better understanding of her own goals.

“I finally got it in my head that what I have to do – the only thing that I have ever really wanted—is to become known as a serious writer… that I am fascinated by psychic work but I will no longer devote all my time to it.”

But she still feels that creativity and psychic phenomenon are highly. connected. She plans to work on fiction and poetry in the daytime and produce her psychic books through Seth at night.

Summing up what she is trying to do psychically she said:

I think there’s a magic that gives all life its vitality. It’s something that adults often lose. What people call psychic phenomena are simply the innate human qualities that connect you with nature—through which you can learn more about the nature of reality, life and consciousness.”

*Note: The poem Jane wrote as a child is in Part 1 of the Village Voice interview. She said she never even had a cat. 🙂

– – – – –  FEBRUARY 2, 1969 (SECOND ARTICLE EXCERPT)

Sunday Telegram, Elmira NY February 2, 1969 

ESP Brings Forth a ‘Shrewd, Human Person’ by Peg Gallagher [Excerpt of original article.]

Seth, An Ageless Entity, Page 4B:

“Now I stand behind Seth’s own words. I do agree that he is an essence energy personality, no longer focused in physical reality. He apparently is something different than somebody’s Uncle Joe who is dead and now speaks,” said Mrs. Butts.

“Seth is a much more advanced entity, a combination — in our terms, the sum total of his own reincarnational past and lives. He is not a secondary personality and not part of my subconscious.

“He has also said that he has spoken to various people in other places and other times and that the material has appeared through the ages but has ended up getting distorted so he is giving it again. He thinks it’s important that it be published.” 

Feeling a responsibility to have the material distributed — and having reached a point where she feel she has a better understanding of its source — she sent samples of the material and an outline of the book to Prentice Hall.

Obviously intrigued by the material, an assistant editor at Prentice Hall, Tam Mossman, replied with a request for information from psychologists concerning Seth to determine his authenticity.

Apologizing for his “scrupulosity,” Mossman explained that while he was interested, it takes “some doing to make our management accept the idea of a disembodied co-author”.

Two well-known parapsychologists with whom Mrs. Butts had been in contact sent Prentice Hall convincing and enthusiastic letters, with one describing what he obviously considered an extraordinary encounter with Seth.

Both stressed that what should be important to the publishing company is not what or who Seth is — but the veracity of the material.

Mrs. Butts first came in contact with one of the parapsychologists, Dr. Eugene E. Bernard, in 1966 after an Associated Press article in The Star-Gazette concerning Dr. Bernard’s research work at North Carolina University on a phenomenon called astral projection or out-of-body travel.

Dr. Bernard was quoted as saying that about one in every 100 persons has experienced out-of-body projection which he said “is like lying on a sofa, getting up and seeing your body still lying on the couch.” The mind, he said, may remain in the same room or be projected thousands of miles away.

Mrs. Butts wrote to Dr. Bernard to tell him that in her experiments with extrasensory perception, she had experienced out-of-body travel many times.

In the correspondence that followed, Mrs. Butts described what was happening with a Personality called Seth. Finally, Dr. Bernard came to Elmira to “satisfy myself concerning the authenticity of the Seth sessions…”

Dr. Bernard, who taught at Cambridge University and was a research psychologist with General Electric before going to North Carolina University, decided that he would in his conversation with Seth pursue a topic on which he was knowledgeable but which he felt was “largely foreign territory” to Mrs. Butts.

“I chose to pursue these topics at a level of sophistication which I felt at least made it exceedingly improbable that Jane could fool me on. Substituting her own knowledge and mental footwork for those of Seth, even if she were doing it unconsciously,” he wrote in a letter to Prentice Hall.

“The best summary description I can give you of the evening is that it was simply for me a delightful conversation with a personality or intelligence or what have you whose wit, intellect and reservoir of knowledge far exceeded my own,”

“He was clever and charming, and with a very distinct conversational style in no manner like that of Jane. Moreover, I had little difficulty determining that Seth had very much the better command of the topics which I had purposefully chosen to press him on, and on which I heretofore felt reasonably confident.”

“In any sense in which a psychologist of the western scientific tradition would understand the phrase, I do not believe that Jane Butts and Seth are the same person, or the same personality, or different personalities in the same person, or different facets of the same personality, etc., etc.”

“And it is my equally firm conviction that bright and charming as she is, Jane Butts could not consciously or unconsciously have carried on for the some few hours the intensive and searching conversation which Seth generously accorded me.”