“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Our days and nights passed in such a kaleidoscope of activity, broken by such uneven periods of sleep, that we hardly noticed whether they were hot or cold, clear or rainy. The grass began to change color from brown to a pale yellow-green. Jane often dozed in her chair in the daytime, but woke up during the nights to watch old movies on television. During her first weeks home, I seldom slept more than two hours at a time: It seemed that I was always getting up to check the dressings on her decubiti, to adjust her pillows, to help make her more comfortable on the motor-driven, pulsating air mattress we’d finally settled upon as the best recommended support available. I’d give her a sip of something to drink, and massage her legs as she lay on her back with her knees drawn up. (She can’t straighten out her legs.) I’d sit with her while she had “a few puffs” on a cigarette. The nighttime had a sublime sense of timelessness that I’d always admired. It surrounded our bedroom—but even as bleary as I often was, I became acutely aware of how that serenity could be jarringly compromised by the television set, showing programs that contained their own times of day and seasons.

Jane tried to write with her impaired right hand, frustrated again and again because she couldn’t hold a pen well enough to put down the ideas stirring in her mind. At times she used her recorder in an effort to compensate for her lack of writing ability, but this left us with the prospect of finding the time to transcribe the tapes—and so far we haven’t done so. (Much of that material is so personal that at this time we don’t want others involved with it, by the way.)

(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.”)

(9:25 P.M. Jane’s pace had generally been okay, considering the circumstances. “I felt like when I got slow there a couple of times that it didn’t have anything to do with dozing off” she said, referring to a few longer pauses. “They were just normal things….” I told her she’d done well. “But I really got worried tonight, when I started drifting like that before the session,” she added.

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.

Equally important is Seth’s suggestion that Jane no longer needs “to try to be the perfect self,” even on an unconscious basis. And, frankly, I want a good amount of additional material—from Jane and from Seth—on her progress in resolving her deliberations on the merits of continuing physical life.

Actually, I was amazed at the opacity of my perception: It seemed that once again I was just beginning to understand that Jane had chosen to embark upon a journey in which she would explore herself and the world in intensely physical and emotional terms—in contrast to the more intellectual ways by which she and I have usually conducted our searches, through the Seth material and our own inquiring minds…. I was frightened by her resolve, and by my own acquiescent participation in such a plan. And why, I wondered, did most of us, most of the time, buy our new experience and knowledge at such high prices?)

(9:30 A.M. Friday, April 16, 1982. Seth-Jane came through with that little session five days ago. One might say that this morning Jane continued it in her own session, exploring especially Seth’s opening material. At first she tried to do it as best she could through writing: Painfully, holding her pen awkwardly, she spent over an hour recording the first four paragraphs—even then, after checking our records, I added to her work material about dates and sequences.)

(11:30. Finally I began writing down Jane’s words as I’d done before. Very unusual, by the way—her coming through with dictation from whatever source this early in the day.)

(11:35. “Let me relax for a minute,” Jane said. Her pace had been fast. Then more slowly:)

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.

(11:50 A.M. We stopped for lunch. Jane had dictated her material just as she had on April 1 and 5, without going into trance. And I told her I was almost certain that when I went back to finishing the notes for Dreams itself, I’d be adding much personal material to them. She didn’t object, although I’m sure she would have done so—and strenuously—in earlier years.)

We didn’t return to “work,” however, until we’d enjoyed a covered-dish supper that a loving neighbor had prepared for us. By then our visiting nurse had come and gone. I’d run quick errands to the drugstore and the supermarket, and written two letters to correspondents explaining that we had no time for visitors. There was more than a little irony and humor connected with my efforts here, though, for no sooner had I sealed the second letter than there was a knock on the front door of the hill house. An unexpected visitor stood there: a young woman lawyer who had flown to Elmira from San Francisco to see Jane. Although Jane was hardly at her best, she discussed her caller’s personal problems with her for an hour. I took a nap as soon as the lady left.

(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.]

He will, then, continue to improve, because he has allowed himself some room for motion, for change of value fulfillment. Trust the body’s rhythms as these changes occur, however. Going out in the yard (as Jane did this afternoon in a wheelchair, accompanied by her nurse) was an excellent case in point, important on practical and symbolic levels.

(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.]

“I wonder what you’ll be doing six months from now, if Seth’s right?” I asked. “The body finally became so desperate to free itself from that rigid sinful-self superhuman image that it took itself into the hospital for a month—even if it did almost kill itself in order to get there….” Jane concurred. And right away she described several occasions when she thought her thyroid gland had rather seriously misbehaved. I remembered two of them.)

After the session I began to wonder what Jane’s “sinful self” would have to say now, in comparison to the material she’d received from it in June 1981. During that fervent bout of activity her sinful self had explained and defended its actions most eloquently throughout some 36 closely handwritten pages. Both of us had been appalled at the revelations coming through Jane’s pen, even if we did grudgingly admit that we understood, intellectually at least, many of the points that self made. I’d grown very angry as the material unfolded—angry at that portion of Jane’s psyche for clinging so tenaciously to such a set of beliefs, for whatever reasons, and angry at myself for not understanding any better than she did their extent and depth, and just how damaging they could be in ordinary terms. I’d also been reminded of material Seth himself had given a few weeks earlier, in a very important private session on April 16: “Many of Ruburt’s beliefs have changed, but the core belief in the sinful self has been very stubborn. (To me:) While you do not possess it in the same fashion, you are also tainted by it, picking up such beliefs from early background, and primarily from your father in that regard….”

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….

I could write many windy pages about the mysteries of life, I suppose, and how each of us does the best we can, although often we may not understand what we’re doing; but what I really want to do is simply note that in her case, fortunately, and even if she may think she’s failed in certain major areas of life, Jane has achieved some remarkable insights into her own situation (as I have into mine, being her marriage partner). She’s managed to do this with the help of various portions of her own personality, the Seth material, and me. Our hope is that her case can help illuminate others. There are reasons—creative reasons—why she can’t walk now, or write in longhand. We insist upon knowing what those reasons are. Some of them were obviously engendered by and within Jane’s so-called sinful self. What challenges she and I have to meet! Once again, let me quote Seth from that private session Jane held just a year ago, on April 16, 1981: “Your kind of consciousness, relatively speaking, involves some intrinsic difficulties along with spectacular potentials. You are learning how to form reality from your own beliefs, while having at the same time the freedom to choose those beliefs—to chose your mental state in a way that the animals, for example, do not. In that larger picture (underlined) there are no errors, for each action, pleasant or not, will in its fashion be redeemed, both in relationship to itself and … to a larger picture that the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive.”

One small way in which I wanted to begin that quest was for me to teach Jane to write—print, actually—with her left hand, which functions much better now than her right one does. I thought this might be relatively easy for her to do, since she’s often voiced her suspicion that she’s one of those born “lefties” who at a very early age were forced to begin writing with their right hand. She has yet to do anything about my suggestion. (I spoke from my own related experience, since as a native right-hander I taught myself to print with my left hand just to see if I could do it. Now I always do crossword puzzles that way.)

At the end of May and early in June 1981 we published two books involving years of effort: Seth-Jane’s The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, and Jane’s The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto. I was positive that those volumes contained much excellent work. I was also positive that with their publication, Jane’s symptoms—especially her walking difficulties—became considerably worse. On the surface at least, it was as though some powerful portion of her psyche were exacting a grim compensation for the books’ appearance in the marketplace. Perhaps, I thought, that portion was creating a physical disability that allowed Jane to publish forbidden material while protectively isolating herself—and me—from rejection by the physical world. Both of us became terribly upset. Our joint lifework teetered upon the edge of a physical disaster.

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.

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.

So in a fashion [Jane’s] physical symptoms became a psychological disclaimer, so that in some court of larger values we could not be “sued” for leading others astray from entrenched beliefs that we were still discarding, while not having any completed structure that would allow easy access or safe passage from one “life raft” to the new one that we were trying to provide….

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….