“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.”)

(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.)

He (Ruburt) need not try to be the perfect self, then, the superimage—and in fact to some extent he found himself the supplicative [self], knocking upon creaturehood’s earthly door, as any creature who found himself wounded through misadventure might ask aid from another. He found a mixed world, one hardly black or white, one with some considerable give-and-take, in which under even the most regrettable of circumstances there was room for some action, some improvement, for some … creative response. The rules of the game have therefore been automatically altered. The issues are clearer, dramatically etched.

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?)

So, one thing I know: I’m a far different person now as I write this Introduction than I was when Seth dictated the book. And as he spoke of the beginnings of the world, I began to play with the idea of quietly ending my own private sphere of existence. Not through a violent suicide, but through a half-calculated general retreat.

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.

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.

I could feel Rob hoping that my own efforts would help me. In a hundred ways he tried his best to help me on his own. Seth resumed work on Dreams during that July, but each day I seemed to work less and less. Summer turned into fall, then winter, and I hardly noticed. I began to doze in my chair as I sat at my desk. On occasion I was consciously aware of thinking how easy it might be on certain levels to let my desires drop one by one—there seemed to be few left in any case—and to let myself simply drift off into an unastonished death.

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.

The next few days, in mid-February 1982, found me determined to clear up the hearing problem—and on one level at least, it was that determination that led me finally to the hospital’s emergency room. We had no family doctor to call upon, but through the invaluable help of a dear friend who was also a nurse, we set up an appointment with a doctor at the hospital.

(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.

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.

(7:50.) So contrary to its own beliefs, and helpless or not, Ruburt was holding his own….

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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….