“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.

(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.”)

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.

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.)

Few overt hints of this appear in Rob’s notes for Dreams. For one thing, the process of withdrawal was slow at the start. For another, when Seth was more than three-quarters of the way through Dreams he began devoting a series of private sessions to an in-depth discussion of “the magical approach”—material that was calculated to help me personally, and others like me, change our approach to experience and thus experience itself. Rob’s detailed notes about my physical condition, then, appear in those pages.

We might have inserted some of this introductory material into that large gap in Dreams, since very important portions of it were acquired during that time, but we didn’t want to interrupt the sessions for the book with different subject matter. We decided to outline our story here instead, and to carry it through the hospital experience, since that was its logical outcome. Rob also wants this material presented as a unit so that it can serve as a foundation for future books we’re already discussing, and I agree with his decision.

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.]

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.

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.”

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.

Our explorations involved no secondhand evidence handed down by others, but the direct personal encounter of our consciousness and being with the vast elements of the unknown—a meeting of the self (human and vulnerable) with the psychological realms of gods and eternities; giant realms of mind that our nature felt attracted to … and [was] uniquely equipped to perceive.

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.

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.

So the belief in man’s sinful nature persisted in my mind, a constant reminder of man’s ignorance of his own nature. How could I be sure that our sight wasn’t also distorted; that our “sin” was in not accepting sin as a value? Perhaps sin itself contained some value that escaped beyond our calculations, still undiscovered.

But—it now becomes evident—I was myself tinged not by sin in a metaphysical sense (as I thought I might be), but with a belief in sin (itself) that I had not dismissed. Therefore the disclaimer was necessary to protect myself and others from any fatal flaw in our work—a flaw that sin’s blindness made invisible….

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….