“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In our ceaseless search for answers to an unending list of personal questions, we discussed the notion that in her own way Jane has described a circle from her childhood: Her parents, Marie and Delmer, were married in Saratoga Springs, a well-known resort town in upper New York State, in 1928. They were divorced in 1931, when Jane was two years old. (Jane didn’t see her father again—he came from a broken home himself—until she was 21.) By the time Jane was three years old, her mother was having serious problems with rheumatoid arthritis. Indeed, the daughter has only one conscious memory of seeing her mother on her feet. All we have are a few photographs Del took of Marie not long after their marriage. They show a beautiful woman wearing a bathing suit, standing on a beach in Florida.

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.

None of the doctors we talked to would say outright that rheumatoid arthritis is inherited—only that “it seems to run in families,” and that more women than men develop it. Even today we saw a well-known specialist say the same thing on a national television program. Yet except for her mother’s case there’s no history of arthritis in Jane’s family, outside of a “routine” trace of rheumatism in a couple of grandparents. The curious question arises: Why, then, did first Marie and then Jane begin showing their symptoms? (As closely as we can determine, Marie was about 26 years old at their onset. Jane was 35; she’ll be 53 tomorrow.)

My own belief, which I’ve held for some 15 years, is that in Jane’s case at least the young girl’s psychological conditioning was far more important—far more damaging, in those terms—than any physical tendency to inherit. I think that Marie’s domineering rage at the world (chosen by her, never forget) deeply penetrated Jane’s developing psyche, and—again in those terms—caused her to set up repressive, protective inner barriers that could be activated and transformed into physical signs at any time, under certain circumstances. Out of many possibilities, the daughter’s conditioning was psychically chosen and accepted, and through that focus she meant to interact with the mother’s behavior. This, to me, is an example of the way a course of probable activity can be agreed upon by all involved.

This isn’t all, however, for experiments have now shown that the brain/mind connection can influence immunity, through stressful conditioning either enhancing its effects or subduing them. Until a very few years ago it was medical dogma that the immune system was entirely independent of any “outside” influence. But recently certain brain chemicals were discovered paired off with cellular chemical “receptors” in the immune system, and researchers expect to find many more of these associations. In physical terms, then, I think it quite possible that in Jane’s case long-term stress, beginning in her early childhood, consistently overstimulated her immune system. Over and over Marie told Jane that she was no good, that the daughter’s birth had caused the mother’s illness. Well before she was 10 years old Jane had developed persistent symptoms of colitis, an inflammation of the large intestine/bowel that is often associated with emotional stress. By her early teens she had an overactive thyroid gland. Marie—and others—told her that she would burn herself out and die before she was 20 years old. Her vision was poor; she required very strong glasses (which she seldom wore). Finally in her mid-30s there came the beginning of rheumatoid arthritis: Jane’s immune system greatly increased its attack upon her body.

To return to just Jane and Marie, then, I think that their long-range cyclical behavior and interaction, no matter how painful it may seem on the surface, represented deep challenges set up by mother and daughter for certain overall purposes that they wanted to experience, separately and jointly. Not only would the two women be emotionally tested and enriched across physical and psychological time, but so would their entities or whole selves.

One of their common creations within the same time scheme was rheumatoid arthritis, of course, for Jane began to show her version of it some eight years before Marie died. That mutual illness obviously became a deeply charged subject for both of them. However, with that fine stubbornness I mentioned in the first essay, Jane never told Marie of her own affliction; since the two no longer saw each other, consciously Marie never knew. Both of us think she did know psychically, though. I even think that mother and daughter shared the same case of arthritis—there weren’t two separate instances of it.