“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In later years it’s become impossible for me to close my eyes to the multiple pressing differences that exist between Seth’s explanation of the nature of reality, and of our own private experience of it. In this book, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, for example, Seth portrays us as a vibrant, well-intended species—a physically attuned kind of consciousness beautifully tailored by our own cosmic ingredients to live lives of productivity, of spiritual and physical enjoyments, with each individual life in charge of its own fate and adding to the potentials of all other life as well.

(Long pause at 7:51.) It began to strike me that even my own physical incapacities were indeed creative ventures that appeared in my experience as bad, or limiting, or even tragic. Perhaps they were instead efforts on the part of my own explorations of value fulfillment to reorganize my life’s vast energies. But instead of facing up to a considerable change in life-style, I panicked and felt myself to be almost assaulted, forced into a life that offered less and less physical freedom. So again, how did that experience fit into Seth’s Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment?

(8:02 P.M. “Oh, that’s all,” Jane suddenly said. Her delivery this evening had been as fast as that of last time, yet more subdued. Her voiced had carried the same tremor. She was tired, and I was far from being at my best as I fought off a half-repressed cough—an affliction that seldom troubles me.)

Yesterday, Sunday, had marked the end of Jane’s first week home from the hospital. We’d found it to be an exceedingly difficult one for a number of reasons. “The toughest week of our twenty-seven years together,” I told a neighbor last night. To see my wonderful, lovely wife so reduced to her present near-helpless state was almost more than I could bear. Jane herself was displaying a stoicism (I’m afraid to write “acceptance”) regarding her condition that I’d have found unendurable were I the one experiencing it. I reacted very badly at times, I’m afraid, alternating profound moods of despair with those of great tenderness, love, and compassion. I wanted to cry and could not. With a more painful heart I yearned for my wife to walk to me, hips innocently and joyfully swaying, as she used to do years ago, when she’d meet me every day as I left the printing company where I worked as a commercial artist. That had been shortly after we married, in 1954. We were living in Sayre, Pennsylvania, a middle-class railroad town in which I’d grown up, which lies only 18 miles southeast of our present home in Elmira, New York. Not that I wanted Jane to be magically transformed into a 25-year-old again—just that I ached to see a resurgence of that uninhibited, unplanned joy of motion for its own sake. For now I understood that freedom of motion was at least one true reflection of an individual’s creative potential.

Jane struggled to regain strength in her legs. Without being aware of it, I’d begun to lose weight after she was admitted to the hospital, and by now my loss had reached the point where others began to notice it. Deliberately I began to eat more. I became extremely busy after my wife came home, making what seemed like endless calls and trips about getting prescriptions filled, about trying out various kinds of beds and mattresses and chairs and hospital gowns, about insurance, about a commode, about having a speaker phone hooked up to our regular phone so that Jane wouldn’t have to hold the standard bulky handset to her ear. We even had a small remote-controlled television set installed in our bedroom so that she could watch it, say, when she was restless during the night. When I began sleeping on the couch in the living room, where it was quieter and darker, we bought a pair of wireless intercoms so that Jane could call me from her bed at any time. We also made some rather expensive mistakes, buying certain equipment that proved useless to us.