“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.

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.

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….