“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Our week just past had been filled with a desperate energy as we struggled to get settled so that we could return to “work”—to our arts—on some sort of a regular basis. To our dismay, we discovered that Jane had lost much of the use of her legs while in the hospital, since during that month she’d been actively discouraged from using them in her accustomed way. This complicated enormously all of our efforts to help her move about the house as she used to in her office chair, which is on rollers, and nearly signaled the failure of our efforts to live by ourselves. [...] I, for one, was afraid that such an arrangement would not only demonstrate our acceptance of the fact that Jane was really caught in a terrible, permanent situation, but that it would end up destroying us psychologically and creatively.

If life has such great potentials, as Seth maintains, if it began—and begins (and continues to begin) at such rich creative and productive levels—then why did our experience so often make it seem that we struggled against unknowing or uncaring cosmic forces, or that we were at the most so ignorant of our own source and creativity that our hands were tied, or that we were forever shut off from our natural heritage?

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.

[...] “The toughest week of our twenty-seven years together,” I told a neighbor last night. [...] 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. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

And amid all of this frenetic activity our painting and writing—those activities we’d always regarded as the creative hearts of our lives, the very reasons we’d chosen to live on earth this time around—had receded into a far distance, so that they’d become like dimly remembered dreams, or perhaps actions practiced in probable lives by “more fortunate” versions of ourselves.

(7:15 P.M. Our next “Jane session” took place four days later, on the date shown above. [...]

Yet, I read all of those dire newspaper stories predicting disaster, and (oh yes, dear readers) I watched the daily tragic news events dramatized in living color on our television screen. [...]

[...] There was no doubt as far as I was concerned that every one of our standard explanations for life (pause) were relatively useless now, regardless of how much they might have helped or hindered us in the past.

[...] The same processes appeared in my husband Rob’s life, of course, as our lives seemed to impinge into the area of man’s greatest hopes, and into the opposite area of his greatest fears.