“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We finally held our first “new” Seth session last Monday evening, on April 12. It was short but, as I expected it would be, excellent. We were pleased to get it for, as I told Jane, if ever we’re to understand all of the events in our lives that led to the hospital experience, we must call upon every ability at our service. And even though this is a personal session, still I think it contains clues that apply to all of us. Jane went into trance as easily as ever, but her Seth voice contained the same underlying tremor I’ve noticed on a number of occasions since she’s returned home. Remember that in the following excerpts Seth—who claims to be discarnate—calls Jane by her male “entity name,” Ruburt, and thus “he” and “him.”)

For all of your complaining (Seth told us with some humor at 8:56), you understand in rather good measure the decisions and actions that motivate your lives, so that Ruburt is more than usually aware of the manipulations that psychologically and physically lie just beneath the material usually carried by what is ordinarily called the conscious mind. Therefore, a kind of momentary gap appeared between his life and his living of it—a pause and a hesitation became obvious between his life and what he should do with it, as his condition showed just before the hospital hiatus.

(9:10.) To such a degree, of course, the affair was, then, therapeutic. Ruburt is now far more willing to make certain changes in his life than he was earlier, and he sees himself more as one of a living congregation of creatures—less isolated than before, stripped down from the superperfect (subconscious) model, and therefore no more under the compulsion to live up to such a psychological bondage. (All delivered with considerable emphasis.)

We were very pleased with the session. It contains a number of important clues. The arthritis diagnosis, Jane said, was the only one the medical profession could offer, given its insights and viewpoints—but after all those years would she be able “to set it aside”? Seth has insisted all along that she doesn’t have arthritis per se. Instead, according to him, Jane adopted her physical immobility as a form of protection against going too far, too fast, with her unique abilities. Yet she also used her “symptoms” to intensify her focus upon those abilities, and to reinforce the strongly secretive aspects of both of our natures. I must add, however, that these three statements represent great simplifications of very complex psychological phenomena.

All of that work—and more—accounts for the long delay in the completion of Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment. Actually, with the exception of one session held in November 1980, I let my work on the book go for over 13 months, from early June 1980 to mid-July 1981.

Indeed, Seth’s material on the magical approach was so fascinating that by the time he finished Dreams I’d already put together large portions of it in a separate book, even if much of it was personal. Not only that, but those “magical” sessions had naturally developed into another series, this time on a portion of the personality Seth called “the sinful self”—mine as well as that of others—and those sessions had in turn led me to produce many pages of material directly from my own sinful self. That great personal revelation took place in June 1981. Ironically, then, in the midst of my own half-conscious withdrawal I’d been giving birth to not only Seth’s Dreams, but several other intriguing long-range concepts. And even if all of those sessions had been born out of my own psychic and psychological challenges and dilemmas, I knew they were excellent and deserved publication.

That is, I thought it could all happen so easily and naturally and painlessly that there would be no one point where you could say, “Now she lives and now she doesn’t.”

Maybe I’d produced all I was meant to. Maybe the fire of my life was coming to its own natural conclusion. Why try to fan it into life again, particularly if its initial joy had forever vanished? Maybe that course was better than the determination and painful discomforts that might be necessary to prolong lifely existence. So I was to some extent only half alarmed to hear from some strange inner existence my own voice slow down. Tremors appeared in it, as if the vowels and symbols had endless gaps—uneven edges—and some part of me was escaping like smoke even between my words.

My hearing began to fail, at first gradually. Let people talk around me, I thought: I no longer cared. Then with bewildering impact I found myself one day almost entirely deaf. Here was no gentle lulling silence, for the absence of sound frightened me beyond anything I could remember. (Long pause.) Was Rob in the room? If I couldn’t see him I couldn’t tell. Did he stand protectively just behind my chair, ready to help me in my maneuvers into bed, or was he in the kitchen, rooms away? There were no sounds of footsteps upon the carpeted floors, no telltale hint of activity. The experience interrupted my retreat. I remember somehow equating all the silence about me with a forbidding white wall. And in parentheses: (I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did.) I couldn’t die deaf (Jane said with a laugh at 11:45). I think I had imagined that everything would shut down gradually. I certainly hadn’t planned on one sense suddenly turning off.

(This evening [on April 16] Jane suggested that we sit at our living-room table while I read her morning’s dictation to her. But instead: “Well, I guess I’ll do a Seth thing tonight,” she announced, rather to my surprise, “but it won’t be long at all….” This is the second time she’s spoken for Seth since leaving the hospital. When she went into trance at 7:39 her Seth voice had a distinct tremor—one decidedly more pronounced than on April 12—and a hard-to-define faraway quality. She spoke with many long pauses. I think that in the following excerpts Seth rather neatly encapsulates her past beliefs, her present condition, and how far she has yet to go in meeting her challenges. [Not that I’m the innocent bystander in all of this, of course. I’m deeply involved.]

If earlier, however, Ruburt had the erroneous idea that he was going too fast—or would or could—and had to restrain himself and exert caution, now he received the medical prognosis, the “physical proof” that such was not the case, and in fact that the opposite was true: He was too slow. If our words could not convince him, or his own understanding grasp the truth, then you had the “truth” uttered with all of the medical profession’s authority. And if once a doctor had told him years ago how excellent was his hearing, the medical profession now told him that his slowness (his thyroid deficiency) had helped impair his hearing to an alarming degree.

(7:58.) There was a certain comradeship existing between himself and others [in the hospital]. Desires and impulses became more immediate, clearer-cut, easier to identify. The discomforts of a physical nature led to instant responses…. His weaknesses were out in the open, dramatically presented, and from that point, unless he chose death he could only go forward—for suddenly he felt that there was after all some room to move, that achievements were possible, where before all accomplishments seemed beside the point in the face of his expected superhuman activity.

(8:10 P.M. Jane’s Seth voice had grown a little stronger as she progressed with the session. We were very encouraged by two key points Seth had mentioned: that her thyroid gland had repaired itself before—such an event happening now would free her of dependence upon medication—and that her sinful self’s superhuman image had “cracked and crumbled in the hospital experience.” Those two developments could leave her body free to heal itself. [In the first essay I wrote that according to her doctor Jane’s thyroid gland has ceased functioning, and that she has to take a substitute hormone daily for the rest of her life. But the doctor hadn’t expressed any idea at all that a thyroid gland could regenerate itself.]

It’s impossible to present here all of Jane’s own material on her sinful self—much as I’d like to—but shortly I do want to give portions of the first few pages to show readers how experiences from one’s very early years can sometimes have the most profound effects in later life. As will be seen, that material obviously raises as many questions as it answers, but right now we can do little more than touch upon the whole affair. We have years of work ahead of us as we search for understanding. Certainly Jane chose all of her challenges in this life, just as I did, and as we believe each person does, but a major concomitant of focusing upon certain activities involves how one copes with them (often in close cooperation with others) as the years pass: What new and original depths of feeling and idea are uncovered, layer by layer, what insights, what rebellions, and, yes, what acceptances….

It could hardly have been accidental, then, that beginning on June 17, 1981, our deep need led to Jane’s spontaneous production of her own sinful-self material. The way had been illuminated by Seth himself in his private sessions, with his discussions of her sinful self and related challenges: Those sessions, the publication of the two books, Jane’s personal sinful-self material and her worsening physical situation, all combined to serve as a complex trigger. Here are those promised, very revealing passages. I presented their beginning in the notes for Session 931, in Chapter 9 of Dreams. I repeat that material here but add considerably more to it. Again, my few insertions are bracketed.

I resent the designation unjustly given to me, for if I have believed in the phenomenon of sin and sought—apparently too rigidly—to avoid it, my intentions and interests always were not the avoidance of sin so much as the pursuit of eternal truths; the alliance with universal goals, the unity in spirit at least of self, whole self, and universal mind. Those goals ignite your creative powers and have (and still do) propelled you to explore all categories of existence possible, seeking to express those divine mysteries that lie within and behind each existence—yours, and mine as well.

I believed in the soul’s survival first of all, and inspired the “creative self” to step out as freely as possible even while in my heart I [also] believed in the existence of sin and devil. I felt upon my heart the heavy unkind mark of Cain, sensing that humanity carries (unfairly) the almost indelible strain—the tragic flaw—[of] being tinged by sin and ancient iniquities. Thusly I reasoned: If I am flawed I must automatically distort even those experiences of the soul that seem clearest. I must unwittingly fall into error when I trust myself the most, since I share that sinful propensity. Yet despite these feelings did I (did we) unswervingly set forward.

Yet even in our [Jane’s] childhood years I yearned to free us from such doctrines, to search for alternate explanations, to go where no man or woman had gone before, and to venture outside the boundaries of all official beliefs.

And to me this was no play but the main challenge—to discover while within one life all life’s meaning; to acquire in one life’s vulnerable swiftness evidence of eternity’s breadth and depth, to sniff out its extended unknown dimensions. So if in the pursuit of such goals I overdid my cautions and overreacted, it certainly was not out of malice, but in a well-meaning attempt to protect the creative self—to keep a hand of caution on its course lest the centuries of man’s belief in sin carried a true weight that I shared but could not comprehend.

Easy enough to discard this or that symbol of evil, but suppose all such symbols hid some deep truth, and cast some restraining base of force that in my ignorance I still did not perceive? For by this time in our experience, yours and mine, the creative self was rambunctiously rushing forward, despite all the cautionary statements of many ancient and modern documents, and our books were being read by millions.

And so on. It all was—and is—great material, and more accurate and penetrating than my own ideas as to why some portion of Jane’s psyche might feel a need for protection from the world, or from another part of herself. While profoundly upsetting both of us, the revelations of her sinful self also seemed to provide a magical psychological key: the yearned-for understanding that would finally unlock Jane’s bent physical body. But it didn’t. Nothing did—not Seth, with all of his great material on the magical approach, not the publication of the new books, not even Jane’s own work. The challenge of our learning enough to initiate her recovery was still with us during that summer of 1981.

And as for books, early in August I returned to our publisher, Prentice-Hall, the page proofs Jane had corrected for her book of poetry: If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love. Ordinarily that event would have delighted us, since it meant that before the year was out she’d have another work published. Instead, we despaired over her physical condition as the weeks passed. Just how stubborn could those core beliefs held by her sinful self be? Finally, we were left hoping that the sinful self’s very exposure through its own material would eventually bring about some physical improvement. That didn’t happen either. I painted in the mornings, searching for a peace of mind that I couldn’t obtain in any other way. Jane held a few widely scattered sessions for Dreams, and a number of private ones as fall came, then winter. Those sessions represented largely futile activity, I thought, yet I gladly admitted that each one of them was as unique and creative as ever, no matter what its subject. Perversely, beyond taking it down and typing it, I hardly looked at the Seth material for days at a time. Finally, early in December 1981 I told Jane I was on the verge of refusing to sit with her for any sessions at all, regular or private, for I’d become deeply afraid that the more sessions she held the worse she’d get. Again she refused to go into the hospital. At this time, Prentice-Hall sent us the first published copies of If We Live Again, but as proud as Jane and I are of that book, its appearance didn’t help her. At our small, annual Christmas Eve party we gave autographed copies of the book to close friends—the best presents we could offer. After the holidays, though, we saw few friends and no strangers.

The winter turned into one that seemed to be the longest and coldest in years, although while heavy storms raged all around us, our immediate area of New York State received surprisingly little snow (a fact we were very grateful for!). As Jane had dictated to me in her own session for April 1—the first one presented in these essays—during those early weeks of 1982 her walking, writing, and hearing began to deteriorate markedly. In late February she was hospitalized….