“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.)

I will help you still further understand those manipulations, for many people—most people—carry on the same kind of procedures while making important decisions as to whether or not they will continue life at any given time. But they hide the issues from themselves far more than Ruburt did.

(Long pause at 9:05.) Give us a moment…. The entire issue had been going on for some time, and the argument—the argument being somewhat in the nature of a soul facing its own legislature, or perhaps standing as a jury before itself, setting its own case in a kind of private yet public psychic trial. Life decisions are often made in just such a fashion. With Ruburt they carried a psychic and physical logic and economy, being obvious at so many different levels of actuality. In such a way buried issues were forced into the light, feared weaknesses and inadequacies were actively played out where they could be properly addressed, assorted, and assessed. To whatever degree possible, given your time requirements, I will try to explain such matters.

(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.

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?)

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.

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.

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.]

Just as he’s done at least a couple of thousand times before, Seth opened the session with a certain famous word:)

Now: The same process involving the thyroid gland has happened several times in his (Ruburt’s) life, and in each of those cases it has repaired itself.

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.”

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 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.