“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(On March 6, 1984 I wrote this in the daily notes I make each day at the hospital: “This afternoon I described to Jane my dream last night about Joe Bumbalo. I dreamed he was taken very ill with heart trouble — that all he wanted to do was lay on his back in bed — I think in a trailer environment. His wife Margaret was there, and myself. I’m not sure if this meant Joe’s death or not, I told Jane.”

(I then more or less forgot the dream. At 11:55 a.m., as I was waiting for a call from our lawyer, John Bumbalo, Joe’s son, called. He wanted to borrow my car. His had just frozen up due to unsuspected overheating; he had to be at the Chemung County airport at 2:30 to pick up his sister Judy, flying in from the Midwest, then again at 5:30 to pick up Margaret and Joe. I was of course amazed, since the parents weren’t due back from Florida ‘till May.

(Joe, John said, has been taken very ill — pains throughout his body, in the bones, but also in the heart area. A test of fluid drawn from the heart area had shown free-floating cancer cells. A CAT-scan did not reveal where they came from. Joe had lain in bed in the trailer, and Margaret had resisted sending him to a hospital. His diabetes is out of control. As I drove John to the hospital, he said the date of my dream checked with developments Margaret had described. I may have tuned into the testing of the fluid around the heart, but I doubt if this can ever be confirmed. It doesn’t matter. John took the car after leaving me at the hospital, and called at 6:45 to say “mission accomplished,” that all were home now. He picked me up at 7:05. The weather is poor, and we had a couple of fairly close calls as he drove me home. I told him to have Margaret call me when I can visit them.

Your own knowledge, desire, purpose and intent tuned you into some such communications, so your concern for Joe Bumbalo (our next-door neighbor on Pinnacle Road) tuned you into his physical and emotional state at that time.

(At the close of yesterday’s session I wrote that I visited Joe Bumbalo after leaving Jane at 7:00 p.m. While I was up in his room, 522, Margaret went down to say hello to Jane. Joe is due to go home Thursday morning.

(4:49 p.m. Joe discussed his fears with me last night when I visited him, but I didn’t get a chance to tell Jane about them until I saw her in 330 this afternoon. In other words, she picked up Joe’s fears herself, unless Margaret might have referred to them when she visited Jane last night after I’d left.

(4:44.) Ruburt’s unfortunate evening was the result of his own fears about the body — related to the fact that he then picked up Joe’s own dire fears, and these fueled his own.

Margaret’s visit was somewhat involved, as was your visit to Joe’s room.

(I described my dream of the other day, which I’d already told Jane about: I’d been sitting on our couch with Jane and our neighbor, Joe Bumbalo. Joe was living with us; the three of us were eating supper as we watched a program on TV. Margaret, Joe’s wife, wasn’t in the dream. Briefly, at the time of the dream, I’d wondered if it hinted at something happening to either of them — Joe or Margaret, that is.)

Joe has recovered from a serious heart condition, of course — and if you will excuse me, that was the heart of the matter. Here you saw Jane, or Ruburt, as well-recovered as was Joe. It was as if you had taken in your neighbor Joe to serve as a case in point. Joe also survived the hospital environment.

(Before I turned her on her side, and then took a nap, I tried without success to locate my description of the dream with Jane and Joe in a previous recent session. [...]

(This attitude also fit in with that which Joe had expressed to me during last fall’s World Series in baseball: Looking at the ballplayers with their long hair, mustaches and beards, Joe had asked me where the youth of America was. [...] Joe had said it wasn’t right for young men to let themselves go that way. [...]

[...] Last night I had a very interesting, and at the same time almost a bothersome dream: I dreamed that while I was with Margaret and Joe Bumbalo and their son John, I discovered I was a latent homosexual. [...]

About your dream: (Pause.) You were telepathically picking up some of the thoughts of Joe Bumbalo as he suspiciously wondered about John, because John’s talents and abilities struck him as being too feminine. [...]

At the same time, Joe holds you in fond regard—yet your abilities also were not those that he traditionally assigned to manhood: men did not paint pictures. [...]

[...] Joe A may be an excellent husband, bread-winner, and father, a church-goer who believes in the beauty and goodness of sex. Joe B may hold the opposite viewpoint most intently — that sex is at least evil, perhaps sent by the devil, and below or beneath the dignity of a good man.

Joe A may be quite startled to discover bottles of whiskey lying around in his dresser drawers, when he hardly drinks liquor himself at all. Joe B may suddenly “come to” in a strange bedroom, in a compromising position with a woman it certainly seems to him he has never seen before in his life.

Joe B, while drinking, might suddenly be sent back to his Joe A self. [...]

On topside Joe A may go to church frequently, be kind and considerate to his family, and, say, come home from work every night for supper. [...]

(The priest in charge — there were three of them — said that Joe had planned much of the service himself, and that Joe had asked him: “Why are the good ones taken?” The priest enlarged the question to: “Why is anyone taken?”

(This morning I was dressed to go to Joe Bumbalo’s funeral by 9:15. [...]

[...] We stood outside after the service, three in a row facing each other on the porch, while six others carried Joe’s casket between us and down the steps to the hearse.

[...] A priest gave a short talk at the funeral home, leading it off, maybe for shock value, by telling us that sooner or later every one of us would experience the same thing Joe Bumbalo had. [...]

[...] Regarding my visit with Joe Bumbalo this morning: He has cancer. [...] Was Joe Bumbalo giving birth to a new life form that upon death would be released to continue its growth elsewhere, just as we believe Joe will do after his death?)

[...] They were getting Joe up to go to the doctor’s office for blood work. [...]

(I’d left the house a little early this noon so that I’d have a bit of extra time to go up to room 522 at the hospital, to see if Joe Bumbalo was there — but he wasn’t. I made the trip again after leaving Jane, and this time found him. [...] Joe lay in bed with his eyes closed the whole time, although he alertly followed our talk. [...] This evening she told me the doctors were controlling the diabetes with insulin so Joe could accept the chemotherapy.

[...] His father, Joe, had died at 2:00 p.m. John had just left the house, as Jane and I had left the rest home just before my mother died in November, 1973. [...] She said she thought it was connected to Joe somehow.

[...] Margaret asked me if I’d be an honorary pallbearer at Joe’s funeral, and I said sure. [...]

(I told her about Joe Bumbalo’s obituary notice that I’d found in yesterday’s paper, and that after I left 330 tonight I’d stop at the funeral home to see Joe and the family. [...]

[...] Joe lay in a deep crimson casket. [...]

(Just as I turned Jane on her side after the session, our neighbor Joe Bumbalo — who is very ill with cancer — called to invite me to share Chinese food and rhubarb pie with him and his wife, Margaret. [...] Joe, lying on his couch, saw me trying to swallow, and called Margaret from the kitchen. [...]

[...] A young man I will call Joe wrote Ruburt a letter. [...] Joe tries desperately to abstain. [...]

3. Later, in Chapter 10 of Politics, Jane elaborated upon Seth’s “Joe” material. She also related Joe’s limited model of his nature to some of her own ideas about disciplining her “writing self.”

Joe thinks of such images as very wrong. [...]

(Joe Bumbalo came back into the hospital this afternoon in preparation for his fourth dose of chemotherapy. [...] Joe expressed concern about how long he would live with his cancer. [...]

[...] Dr. K. went home to call Dr. Sobel in Ithaca, and Dr. Wilwerth at St. Joe’s. The former is a rheumatologist who examined Jane at the Arnot, the latter is a specialist in circulatory matters. [...]

[...] “If you were anyone else I’d have you at the emergency room at St. Joe’s for more blood tests,” Dr. K had told Jane at the house. [...]

(I made only one false turn driving to the emergency room at St. Joe’s, since we’d never been there before, but found the entrance easily. [...]

(To leave St. Joe’s I had only to sign a slip of paper promising payment, but we don’t know what the bill will be or when we’ll receive it—within a few days, I suppose. [...]

(Strange, the way things work—today, July 16, 1984, before I reread this session, Joe Bumbalo’s daughter Judy told me that Joe has only 2 or 3 more days to live— bone cancer.)

(Joe Cernohorsky is the specialist mentioned on page 248, the man who keeps the apartment house we live in, in running order for the landlord. Joe and the landlord are of an age, 50, and have been friends for years. Jane and I have never met Joe’s wife, and have no idea what kind of connection Seth might be referring to.

There is some connection with Joe Cernohorsky’s wife, though not a direct one, in all of this.

[...] I told Jane that the material made me speculate about Joe Bumbalo: He’s had many operations in his life, and has been shot full of drugs often. [...] And even now Joe is taking powerful chemotherapy treatments. [...]

[...] [No results in yet of blood tests taken a week ago at St. Joe’s. Tests sent to Rochester.] Jane got more and more depressed and scared as Dr. K. talked, I could see it, in spite of suggestions we’d agreed on before her visit. [...] I wanted to postpone visit to emergency room “till test results were in,” but Dr. S. won’t be at St. Joe’s next week. [...]

[...] No blood test results had really come through yet (from St. Joe’s last week). [...]

[...] A one-syllable name, man’s, beginning with J. Joe. [...]

(“Poppa Joe. [...]

(We have a lovely quiet Xmas—Gallaghers here Xmas Eve—four inches or so of snow, Joe and Margaret here last PM—pleasant—I give Rob his planter thing; we get the bed. [...]