“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

That evocative, prophetic line is from a Sumari song that Jane sang to herself a few days before she went into an Elmira, New York, hospital on February 26, 1982. Sumari is a “language” she can speak or sing while in trance, and which she can translate into English if and when she wants to. She recorded her brief song in a sad, low-pitched, quavering voice that was like none I’d heard her use before. Its indescribable depth of feeling was remarkably prescient in light of the events in our lives that preceded—and then followed—the hospital experience that affected us so much.

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….

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.

Because of her much-reduced thyroid activity, Jane often dozes or even sleeps in her chair. She’d very gradually started doing this before entering the hospital, but any physical causes behind her behavior had been unsuspected by us then. I only saw that she could use the rest, since she obviously didn’t feel well generally—but I also thought she was waiting for one of her characteristic surges of creative energy before digging into her next book (of which she always has several going). Our agreement was that in the meantime she was to start checking the sessions and my notes for Dreams; then I was to type the final manuscript. Jane never reached her goal, however. Instead she napped or drifted—even as she does now—while intermittently reading and rereading our material for Dreams without ever doing anything with it.

We do not just receive the torch of life and pass it on as one Olympic runner does to another, but we each add to that living torch or flame a power, a meaning, a quality that is uniquely our own. We do this as individuals, as members of the family, the community, and members of the species. Whenever that flame shows signs of dimming, of losing rather than gaining potential energy and desire, then danger signals appear everywhere. They show up as wars and social disorders on national scales, and as household crises, as illnesses (pause), as calamities on personal levels as well.

In Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment Seth outlines the great cosmic and private energies that in our terms once brought into existence the reality of the universe and the birth of those private, cohesive realities in which our own individual daily lives are couched.

(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.

When we hesitate, hold back, falter, when we hold back energy in the hopes of saving it, when we allow fear rather than trust to guide our activities, when the quality of our lives becomes less than we know it should be—then warnings flash. (Long pause.) One crisis after another may arise to gain our attention. This has happened in many people’s lives—and so recently the same kind of warning recently appeared in my own life.

“Yeah, I knew I got it—thank God,” she replied. Then we sat quietly side by side at the round card table we’d placed at one end of our battered old couch in the living room. In a far corner a sitcom rerun played on the large-screen television set. I’d turned off the sound before the session began. The whole room was bathed in a friendly, subdued yellow light. A rather strong northerly wind periodically rattled the house’s metal blinds. The whole creative intimacy of our hill house was one that we’d enjoyed many times; we desperately wanted to return to that same ambience many more times.

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.

This is a good place to explain that while Jane was in the hospital neither of us ever made any attempt to “convert” the people there—doctors, nurses, technicians, say—to a belief in the Seth material. Beyond saying that Jane was a writer and that I was an artist, we told no one of our interests in life. We weren’t there to impose our beliefs upon anyone else. We’d made the conscious, joint decision during a time of crisis to seek certain kinds of help from skilled practitioners in the medical field, and we were willing to learn from them, even if those people were pretty certain to have belief systems very different from ours. (Well, I should add with a touch of a smile, at least we were more willing to learn in the beginning!)