“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.

“Let my soul find shelter elsewhere,” Jane said, by way of a quick translation when I played the tape for her a few minutes later. It was midafternoon on a cold day. She sat bundled up in her chair in the living room, her head down as she listened. I asked her for more on the song’s interpretation, but she just repeated that line. She roused herself enough to stubbornly maintain that she’d give me more later. I knew at once that the tape’s contents were so revealing of her feelings about her illness, so disturbing and frightening, that she couldn’t bring herself to explore those deep emotions at that time. I also knew that my wife feared the effect of the message upon me—for what could the phrase she’d already given me mean, except that her soul had at least considered the possibility of leaving her physical body, perhaps to find shelter in a nonphysical realm? I accepted her reactions, and could only wait in some frustration as I began work on other parts of this essay.

As the days passed Jane kept putting me off about doing the translation, until finally I grew resentful and despairing at her refusal to cooperate. I decided to write around that one great line as best I could. For by then I knew that she had no intention of producing an English version: Some childlike and naive, yet deeply stubborn portion of her psyche, some “perverse area,” as Seth, her trance personality, jokingly characterized it long ago, had simply taken over and decided not to do any more on that subject. For its own reasons it didn’t want to, and that was it. I’d seen Jane operate in that fashion before, and I knew she’d have her way.

I should note, by the way, that her bedsores weren’t infected when she went into the hospital, but were less than a week later. How come? “It’s staph,” several of the nurses told us. A sign warning of infection was put on the door of 3B9, Jane’s room, and stayed there until she went home. “If the infection in that ulcer on your coccyx reaches the bone, it means at least a six-week stay in the hospital,” exclaimed Jane’s principal doctor, Rita Mandali (not her real name). Twice-daily treatments with hydrogen peroxide and a sulfadiazine cream were started. And I began to read up on how many kinds of staphylococcus bacteria alone there are, and indeed how common infections are in hospitals, since by their very nature those institutions are far from being the cleanest in town….

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.

After some hesitation following my question about having a session this evening, Jane decided she wanted to contribute introductory material for Dreams. This was to be a new experience for us: Because of the arthritis she was having trouble even holding a pen, so she intended to dictate her material as though she were writing it herself in longhand. I was to take it down for her. This wasn’t to be Seth speaking. For Jane’s own work, however, I note times, occasional pauses, and any other information in italics, just as I do for Seth’s dictation.

(7:10 P.M. Thursday, April 1, 1982. Once she began dictation, Jane’s pace was good. In fact, I had to write very rapidly, for I didn’t want to ask her to slow down during this initial experiment.)

(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.

“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.

(With a laugh at 7:51:) Later that same bare backside, thin and bony, was pressed against another metal table, while this time electrodes were attached to every available area of my head so that an electroencephalogram could be taken. No instructions were given to me except to close my eyes as the test progressed. (Pause.) Some kind of white gum, or glue, had been rubbed into my scalp through my hair to improve the electrical contacts, and when the test was finished the attendant simply grabbed one area of the equipment and pulled the entire mess off my head in one motion—which felt like my entire scalp was coming off. The obvious unconcern on the part of that middle-aged female attendant made me furious.

“Value fulfillment?” I thought. “What the hell am I letting myself in for? And how have the events of my life come to such a turn?” This was, of course, as anyone familiar with hospitals knows, only the beginning. There were numberless blood tests. I also had to be lifted onto and off the bed, onto and off the portable commode.

—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.

(8:21.) In this book, Seth does discuss to some degree the nature of certain illnesses as they apply to individual life and genetic survival. And there I lay in the hospital for a full month, with physical survival uppermost in my mind—hardly a coincidence. They told me that my thyroid gland was very underactive, and that I had arthritis. They X-rayed my hands but not my knees. One of the blood tests showed that I was slightly anemic. But other tests and X-rays revealed that I had sound lungs—in spite of my smoking—a good heart and stomach and other organs. I laughed.

(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.

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.)

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!)

Jane and I didn’t know whether the doctors we did business with even knew what a trance state was. I envisioned some hilarious episodes during which Seth, speaking through Jane, would try to explain to gatherings of medical people just who he was and what he believed. Next, he’d go into what Jane and I believed, and why. Then he’d add some very pungent remarks as to what those in his audiences believed, and why….