“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last night Jane had trouble sleeping. [...] Jane recalled at least three episodes of astral travel. [...] Jane said she was aware of wanting to contact John’s wife Peg during these travels, without the experience being “unpleasant” for either of them...

(On Sunday, May 18, John Pitre called Jane from Franklin, Louisiana and asked that Seth hold a session for his wife Peg; she is in the hospital, in poor condition, with muscular dystrophy. John told Jane it “might be a matter of hours” etc., and wondered whether Seth could give some data on Peg’s psychic activities at the moment, whether she would be helped after physical demise, etc.

(I slipped up concerning the Friday episode, not realizing it could have psychic consequences for Jane. [...] We ate there with my mother and then I brought Jane back home. [...]

[...] Jane’s eyes were heavy as she came out of trance. [...] She now added that although Seth hadn’t said so, the dresser was against the south wall of their place, “like the south wall of our apartment here, to my left,” Jane said.

(A couple of days ago Jane received from Tam a letter written to Tam by Saul Cohen, the editor at Prentice-Hall who’s evidently been assigned to shepherd Jane’s work through production. [...] Anyhow, the letter engendered immediate reactions in Jane of a very positive nature. [...]

[...] Jane had agreed, so I thought. [...] My own reaction to the events in our lives over the years was that consciously we had reached limits, and that it was beholden upon the rest of the personality—Jane’s especially—that it recognize this and back off enough from its own goals so that the physical body could recover, at least enough to ensure survival and a working life in which it could deal with life’s daily goals, and arts, too. [...]

[...] “Hell,” I’d said to Jane, “you don’t know what to say these days. [...]

(Jane became very relaxed, “out of it,” and actually smiled in relief. [...]

[...] We didn’t plan to do this; it just developed, and we eventually realized that it did so through Jane’s simple need for a change in routine. We had plenty of other things to do: I was still occupied daily with writing notes and appendixes for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality; on June 4 Jane received the page proofs for Cézanne, and began correcting them for the printer; on the 14th of the month “our” contractor began converting half of our garage into a writing room for Jane, and adding a large back porch [see the end of Note 2 for Session 801]. [...]

1. Sue Watkins has been mentioned, and at times quoted, in a number of Jane’s books: The Seth Material, Seth Speaks, Adventures in Consciousness, Psychic Politics, and both volumes of “Unknown” Reality. Jane started her ESP class in September 1967. [...] At this time Sue is working on a novel of her own and co-editing a weekly newspaper in a small town some 50 miles north of Elmira, New York (where Jane and I live).

[...] In mid-July our friend Sue Watkins¹ began typing the rest of the final manuscript for Psyche; Jane had managed to help me out by finding the time to prepare the first five chapters for the publisher, but since we were both so busy we asked Sue for assistance. [Sue is a writer also, and knows about things like manuscripts.] Then by the time this 806th session came about, Jane estimated that she was practically through with the first handwritten draft of James. [...]

[...] What were Jane and I doing all of that “time” — that nearly one-quarter of a year of our physical lives?

(“Well, I’ll certainly have a session tonight,” Jane said at 7:50. [...] This morning and afternoon I’d typed the session Jane gave last night. [...]

[...] Tomorrow morning Jane goes on the 100 mcg Synthroid dose for the first time, boosted from the 75 mcg. [...]

[...] “Boy, I want a session from Seth so bad,” Jane said at 8:11. [...]

(I should also add that Jane’s Doctor K. wants her to return to the emergency room there this Friday to see Dr. Sobel from Ithaca—provided he’ll be there, of course. [...]

(The unique thing here is that this is Jane’s first session at which I was not present. In the light of the material obtained in the two deleted sessions earlier this week, we believe this to be a significant step forward, a mark of Jane’s increasing confidence in her psychic ability, and wholehearted acceptance we believe to be necessary.

(Since it was Jane’s first session without my presence, I thought it would be interesting to record some of it. I opened one of the two doors and made notes; thus, the students and Jane were not disturbed on the other side of the remaining closed door. [...]

(This was an unscheduled session, held for Jane’s Thursday night ESP class, and not planned at all. [...]

(Earlier in the day I had heard Jane remark casually, after a little talk between us, that if she felt like it she would let Seth come through during class tonight. [...]

([Rob]The unique thing here is that this is Jane’s first session at which I was not present. In the light of the material obtained in the two regular sessions earlier this week, we believe this to be a significant step forward; a mark of Jane’s increasing confidence in her psychic ability, and wholehearted acceptance we believe to be necessary. [...]

(Since it was Jane’s first session without my presence, I thought it would be interesting to record some of it. I opened one of the two doors and made notes; thus the students and Jane were not disturbed on the other side of the remaining closed door. [...]

(This was an unscheduled session held for Jane’s Thursday night ESP class. [...]

(Earlier in the day I had heard Jane remark causally, after a little talk between us, that if she felt like it she would let Seth come through during class tonight. [...]

[...] Jane did not take a break. [...] Occasionally Jane sipped some wine and smoked a cigarette.)

(Jane said that some part of her that receives concepts from Seth, eventually decides that she has had enough, and then stops getting new concepts. Jane puts the last concept into words, and the session then ends.

(As the session began Jane’s voice was at once loud and quite a bit deeper than usual. [...]

(Jane’s pace was average, her eyes closed. [...]

(Earlier today I told Jane that I was afraid the questions weren’t very representative of Seth’s book, and that to assemble a truly relevant list of them would require an intimate study of each chapter. This we hadn’t done, of course — partly because of time limitations; partly because Jane hadn’t wanted to be that involved consciously. [...]

[...] As the time passed, Jane said she thought she was somewhat uptight because of the questions; she had read them after supper. [...] Finally, Jane took off her glasses.)

[...] Jane’s pace had speeded up considerably, as though she had lost some sort of nervousness. [...] Jane said she hadn’t been cold in trance, but was now.

[...] I contributed a lot of them, but also consulted with Jane. [...]

(Shortly before the session began, Jane made a remark about her hands feeling better after her nap. [...] I found it quite difficult to describe to Jane, for I always felt unspoken, unverbalized connotations in the background that, I thought, represented new ideas for both of us. [...] I tried writing it down so that I could read it to Jane: “Why did the personality adopt a course of action—being out of condition, say—that eventually came to assume such proportions in life that the focus upon it equaled, or even surpassed, the hours spent in the creative actions of writing that the personality said it wanted to do each day above everything else?”

(For the last several days Jane’s arms, shoulders, hands, rib cage, and related parts have bothered her tremendously—more so than ever. [...] I asked that Seth comment on all of these developments, and why they were so painful for Jane.

(The above isn’t an accurate definition of what the insight was about, and I do think it was a valid one; it may be as good as I could get it in discrete words, I told Jane after I’d read it to her. I was after an understanding on various levels of the fact that Jane had created something that certainly assumed equal billing with her other creative work—that the personality may have been quite aware that this would happen, and was willing in some sort of terms for the situation to exist for a number of years.

(I also wondered when Jane would show some improvement in walking for there’s no doubt about it. [...]

(Before the session Jane read over the letter from D. R. Moorcroft, the professor of physics who’d written her such a fine letter on April 3. She divided the letter into questions; Seth may discuss some of them tonight. [...] Seth does refer to the first question Jane had noted, and that material is also presented as the 849th session, as well as being included here.

[...] [Jane is not in favor of public accessibility at this time.] LD explained a few things, suggesting among them a committee, perhaps, to screen qualified applicants to the material. [...] “I can’t believe it,” Jane said a number of times as we talked. [...]

[...] Jane, understandably, had questions about recognition, now that Yale had expressed willingness to accept her work. [...] We don’t think that Yale can have much of an idea of what’s involved with Jane’s abilities, or the subject matter of the Seth material. [...]

(As I told Jane last night, I didn’t realize that I was so tight, so bound up with tensions and stresses, that I was ready to fall ill because of those basic conflicts with self-disapproval, the male-provider role, money, taxes, and all the rest of the daily paraphernalia of living. [...]

(Today while relaxing, Jane received two impressions, both somewhat worrisome, that we hoped Seth would cover tonight.

(Last night Jane woke me up shouting in pain, because of a cramp in her back, momentarily. [...]

(It will be recalled that I had my excellent pendulum session last Sunday, November 5, pinpointing the part I played in Jane’s symptoms. [...]

(Jane began speaking in trance this evening at a slower rate that usual.)

[...] Jane and I had been saving these, and we went over them now before the session. Jane’s pace as the session opened was quite a bit slower than usual.)

(Jane and I each noted questions before the session this evening.

[...] Jane thought a period of less than a century was much too short a time to encompass so many dramatic changes. [...]

[...] Jane’s pace was still quite slow.)

[...] Jane looked good. [...] Georgia was taking care of her today; she washed Jane’s hair this morning. [...]

(Jane described a very vivid and even exhilarating dream she’d had last night, in which she’d been playing with her own collection of trinkets, sitting on the floor, and so forth. [...] Jane said she was really enjoying the dream, after supper, when Debbie Harris arrived for a visit and woke her up.

(Jane read yesterday’s session, but found lots of it hard going. [...]

(“It’s me,” Jane said.

(The next morning Jane told me that once again she’d done “a lot of book dictation” after she went to bed. [...] “Aha,” Jane told herself at last, when the information stopped flowing, “this time I got it all down.” [...]

(12:04 A.M. Jane was soon out of her trance, but it had been a very good one nevertheless. [...]

1. Seth’s material here about dream solutions reminded me of a few lines just about all that were saved — from a poem Jane wrote when she was 17 years old:

Jane’s first published material on dreams (precognitive and otherwise) can be found in chapters 4 and 5 of The Coming of Seth (original title: How to Develop Your ESP Power).

[...] Jane watched him while I went to the post office. [...] Jane and I both wondered: Why Billy? [...] “We were shocked,¹ no doubt about it,” I wrote in my notes for the 836th session, a private or nonbook one which Jane gave that evening. [...]

(On March 5 the frontmatter proofs for Volume 2 — consisting of items like the table of contents, a poem of Jane’s, the titles of her previous books, and so forth — arrived for checking; we expect to see the proofs for Volume 2’s index in a couple of weeks. That night Jane gave the 838th session. Wednesday, I mailed to Prentice-Hall the corrected page proofs for Psyche, and Jane held the 839th session that evening.

(“What,” I wrote for the 836th session, “is the real relationship between the host organism and disease?” Recently Jane and I talked about the evident worldwide eradication of smallpox, as announced earlier this month by WHO — the World Health Organization — and wondered if the disease has truly been eliminated. [...] Obviously, I said to Jane more than once, if as an entity smallpox could “think” as we do, it would hardly consider itself bad, or such an awful disease or scourge. [...]

I might add here another insight into the relationship between Jane and Seth — the kind of information we continue to search for. Before holding the 836th session, Jane had found herself mourning the possibility that Billy might die. [...]

[...] This was a period in which I had a series of potent dreams that Jane has done a lot of work interpreting [including my famous dog dream of March 31, 1979], and which could easily make up several chapters in a book on the subject, if we had the time to produce it. These dreams have been operating as a series, as Jane has pointed out, which increases the value of a person’s dreams in unexpected ways. [...] Jane has interpreted the Bill and Sue dreams, and Seth has commented on them also. [...]

(Then while doing the dishes before this evening’s session, Jane said she “got” that Friday night was the “playout” of my dreams involving Bill Gallagher and Sue, which had taken place separately. The playout wasn’t literal, Jane said, “So I don’t think most people would have made the connections. [...]

(I read my paper quoted just above to Jane as we sat for the session. I asked that Seth comment, but also said I didn’t want him devoting the whole session to my challenges, since I know Jane wants book material also.)

[...] Jane thought so. [...] I told Jane that I didn’t remember reading any ideas like this anywhere.

(By 8:40 the guests had not arrived, and Jane was up from her nap. [...] Jane then expressed a desire to obtain in the future as firm a commitment from witnesses as possible, well in advance of the session in question. [...]

(After supper Jane had read the two dreams quoted previously involving my father. [...] As session time approached Jane no longer felt nervous. [...]

[...] Jane was fully dissociated, so far-out, she said, that she had no conception of the passage of time, whether five minutes or two hours passed. [...] Toward the end Jane’s voice had become quite dry and hoarse, and I had been on the point of asking for a break when Seth did take one.

(Since Seth had not actually discussed the very beginning of my first long dream, Jane and I spoke of this during break. It was a mistake, for no sooner did the subject come up than Jane began again with but one minute’s rest. [...]

(Then Jane told me that last night Shawn Peterson had dropped the bottle of Oil of Olay, and thrown away the dispenser along with the broken glass. [...] I asked Jane why she hadn’t at once asked Shawn to save it, but when she remembered to some ten minutes later, it was too late; Shawn had cleaned up the mess and thrown it all out. [...]

[...] Jane was already on her back; her left shoulder had been bothering her. [...]

[...] At 3:15 Jane started reading yesterday’s session. [...]

[...] “I need to read some of the earlier sessions,” Jane had said when I arrived, so at 3:50 she began reading the session for January 13, a good one, while I did mail. [...]

[...] In this life Ruburt is called Jane, and her husband, Robert Butts, takes down the words that Jane speaks. [...]

(In beginning these notes, let me mention that there are certain definite changes in Jane when she is in trance and speaking for Seth.

(Usually Jane goes in and out of trance with remarkable speed. [...]

(Jane’s voice in trance can be almost conversational in tone, volume, and pace, but is subject to a wide range of these qualities. [...]

(Part of the time her eyes were fully closed as she paced about the room, Jane said, but she could not give me a percentage estimate. [...] Jane thought Seth intended that she begin the session sitting down; instead she got up, and we think it reasonable that as compensation Seth introduced the nearly-closed-eye experiment.

(Jane said she had the idea that Seth got her to sit down by letting her smoke. [...] As soon as she did sit down, Jane began to take longer pauses between phrases at times, as she had done in the last session. [...]

(The following data are from Jane’s psychological time notebook: December 31, Thursday, 11:35: A rather amazing experience of “ecstasy,” the strongest I’ve experienced so far. [...]

(As session time approached Jane became increasingly nervous. [...]