“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Indeed, I didn’t learn that Jane had made the tape until five weeks later, after she’d returned to our hill house from the hospital: I found it on March 30, amid others in her writing room. She hadn’t labeled it, and I began to play it out of curiosity. The song’s mournful tones swam heavily in the room. It reminded me at once of a dirge or an elegy, and I felt chills as I began to intuitively understand just how meaningful it was, even without any translation at all.

Lest I give an inaccurate picture of my wife, however, let me add that she combines instances of that seeming intransigence with a profound intuitive innocence before nature (and thus All That Is), and with a great literal acceptance of nature’s manifestations and of her own being and creations within that framework. Although she’s not entirely in agreement with me on this point, I think that essentially Jane is a mystic—not an easy thing to be in our extroverted, materialistic society, for it represents a way of life that’s little understood these days. It’s a role she’s chosen for many reasons. Mysticism is still overwhelmingly regarded as a profoundly religious expression, and one that’s hardly practical, but in my opinion neither of those situations applies to Jane. Her “mystical way” is reinforced by a strongly secretive characteristic that’s usually belied by her seemingly outgoing character and behavior. It took me a long time to realize this. I also had to learn that her literal cast of mind grows directly out of her mysticism, and that because it does, she can be quite impulsive. There’s nothing halfway about Jane. She’s intensely loyal. She’s a very perceptive person with many abilities, a fine intelligence, and an excellent critical sense. Whatever reservations she shows—her conscious inhibition of impulses, for example—are learned devices that are literally protective in nature. I’ve certainly found her particular combination of attributes to be unique, and I don’t think she’d be able to express the Seth material as she does without them. Throughout these essays I hope to add many insights into her character. For now, though, I present what I have to work with from the saddest, most mournful Sumari song she’s ever created and sung. The tape goes into our files, although I’d love to know what she said on the rest of it….

At first she didn’t know. The question followed the little talk we’d had after supper. My back hurt somewhat. I’d finally decided that the ache wasn’t because I’d been lifting her physically—all 82 pounds of her—but because of the medical bills we’d received today. (That had been my somewhat amused speculation to begin with.) We’ve gotten a flurry—a small blizzard—of bills from doctors during the last few days.

Jane has been home from the hospital since last Sunday, March 28. She spent 31 days there, being treated for a severely underactive thyroid gland (hypothyroidism), protruding eyes and double vision, an almost total hearing loss, a slight anemia, and budding bedsores, or decubitus ulcers. Several of the ulcers had been incipient for a number of months, although neither of us had realized what those circles of reddening flesh meant as they slowly blossomed on the “pressure points” of her buttocks, coccyx, and right shoulder blade. Decubitus ulcers: one of the first terms we’d added to our rapidly growing medical vocabulary—and one of the more stubborn afflictions for a human being to get rid of once they’ve become established. Even now not all of Jane’s decubiti have fully healed, although several of them have closed up nicely.

Jane’s hearing is much improved after treatment with decongestants and a pair of minor operations in which tiny drainage tubes were inserted through her eardrums—the procedure is called surery—to relieve internal blockage. Jane’s thyroid gland, Dr. Mandali finally told her, has simply ceased functioning, so the doctor has begun a program of cautiously rejuvenating my wife’s endocrine system, and thus all of her bodily processes, with a synthetic thyroid hormone in pill form (a low 50 micrograms to start). Jane is to take these pills for the rest of her life. At least that’s the current prognosis. Her double vision is not as severe and is supposed to keep improving as the hormone takes effect. Dr. Mandali has prescribed drops to keep Jane’s eyes lubricated, and a liquid salicylate medication (as a substitute for aspirin) to control joint pain and inflammation. Both of these products are taken four times a day. The increased glandular activity is also expected to have some beneficial effects upon Jane’s arthritis, and possibly upon her anemia (a condition that often accompanies arthritis). I asked that she be tested for food allergies, since I’d read that reactions to various foods and additives can trigger arthritis, but Dr. Mandali said that “if Jane is allergic she (Jane) would know it”—a position I came to most thoroughly disagree with. But usually, I thought, the trouble with having something diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis is that not only do you have it when you go into the hospital, but when you leave it. Such is the state of the art of medicine in this case, unfortunately.

(7:20.) It is impossible in our time scheme to intellectually know our own potentials without trying them out, without testing them against the world’s edges. We must activate our impulses and desires, try out our abilities, seek out our strengths by joyfully advancing into the given world of physical energy, physical time and space. In the development of each individual we act and reenact the startling events that brought our own universe into existence. The universe was not created in some dim past, but is newly recreated by our own thoughts, dreams, and desires—so that reality happens at all possible levels at once. And in that living endeavor we each play our part.

“Well, I don’t know—maybe that’s all I can do tonight,” Jane finally said, with a bit of an embarrassed grin. “It’s hard for me to get into the next part….” But then at 7:45:)

In our other books I’d mentioned my physical symptoms now and then. By the time Seth finished dictating Dreams last month (on February 8), however, my physical condition had deteriorated. Two weeks later I could hardly get out of my chair onto the couch or the bed. After answering approximately 50 letters one weekend, the next weekend I could barely hold a pen to write my name. Soon afterward my hearing began to fade, then suddenly became blocked. A few days later I wound up in the emergency room of one of our local hospitals—and there, all too quickly I became familiar with the medical profession’s battery of testing paraphernalia. (Long pause.) I was placed in a CAT scanner, my bare backside pressed painfully against a cold metal table, my head encircled by the strange doughnut, or globe, while bright white lights and numbers, it seemed, flashed everywhere. They only X-rayed my head.

—wiped away the results of the three strong doses of prune juice I’d been given. Yet there was, I knew, a fellowship even in those processes—one that I had perhaps too long ignored: the quality of fellowship, as a species or a family or a community comes together to help one of its own kind. And as I was to see, even for all of the pessimistic suggestions of medical science itself, in the very middle of crisis there was a certain indisputable sense of cooperation—a “vulgar” physical optimism, and a kind of humor that I had long forgotten existed.

(Long pause at 8:22.I thought Jane was tiring. She might have added that she also laughed because neither did she have a brain tumor, cancer, vasculitis [an inflammation of the blood vessels], or any of several other diseases the doctors thought might be present. She felt she’d beaten a number of negative suggestions from medical personnel in connection with all of those afflictions.)

I liked practically all of the doctors and nurses and orderlies, and they liked me. Most of them didn’t know or care “who I was.” Very few were familiar with my work (although a few local fans—strangers—eventually found their way to my hospital room). I found I could hold my own in that environment that at first had seemed so alien. I learned to joke even as my backside swung perilously above the commode, while I hoped that its aim was true in the hands of the nurses and orderlies—and again I felt that long-forgotten camaraderie with people, and a growth within myself apart from my work, or what I did. I had a right to be on earth because I’d been born here like every other physical creature, and on that level alone I was part of a great framework of physical energy and cooperation.

(8:31 P.M. “Well, that’s all for now,” Jane said after a long pause. “I sure am surprised I did that much. I didn’t know I could do it—especially that way…. I’d never have tried it if you hadn’t suggested it.”

Jane hadn’t dictated this material while in a trance or a dissociated state, as she does when producing her Seth material. She hadn’t felt particularly inspired, nor at all sure how to proceed. It was just that she’s always used longhand or a typewriter for her own work, she said, and never dictated it, as many writers do these days. Just the same, her creative abilities had immediately come to her aid.)