“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some of our other books contain more information on how Jane grew up fatherless, and with a Marie who soon became bedridden and embittered. Mother and child were supported by welfare, and assisted over the years by a series of itinerant housekeepers—a number of these were prostitutes who, according to Jane, were periodically thrown out of “work” when town officials would shut down the “houses,” try to clean up gambling, and so forth. Marie was a brilliant, angry woman who lived in near-constant pain, and who regularly abused her daughter through behavior that, if not psychotic, was certainly close to it. (She would terrify the young Jane by stuffing cotton in her mouth and pretending she’d committed suicide, for example.) Jane also spent time in a strictly run Catholic orphanage. Her father died in 1971, when he was 68. Her mother died in 1972, at the same age; Jane, who hadn’t seen Marie for a number of years, did not attend the funeral. I didn’t urge her to do so, either. For my part, I’d always felt distinctly uneasy in Marie’s presence on the few occasions we met.

I’ve written these passages knowing, of course, that many of Seth’s points and our own are at best theories, if very intriguing ones. Some may contend that they’re not even theories, but only hypotheses—tentatively inferred explanations requiring much further experimentation and examination. Worse still (I write with some humor), they may “only” be ideas. Whatever their status, Jane and I take heart from the letters sent us by many thousands of readers, who have time and again explained how they put the Seth material to use in very positive physical and mental ways. (Except for a few early instances when we inadvertently lost some of our correspondence, we’ve saved all of it. The cartons are piling up in a cellar storeroom. We hope that eventually our “fan mail” will serve as the foundation for a study concerning the ways in which society reacts to new ideas, through the viewpoints, say, of science, philosophy and psychology, religion, the “occult,” skepticism, generalized deep curiosity, and mental illness. Very abusive responses are also involved, as well as surprising near-illiterate ones.)