“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.

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.)

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.

“Oh, why did you have to put that in!” Jane cried in anguish as she read that last sentence. It happened to mark the end of my day’s work, which I’d showed to her after supper. “It’s a fantastic idea, but—”

In these last few pages (since I began discussing my beliefs about Jane’s early psychological conditioning), I’ve indicated the only kind of thinking by which I can personally make sense out of our world these days. Particularly when I consider the “news” on the typical front page of the typical daily newspaper: All too accurately the “stories” of war, pollution, corruption, and poverty and crime show just how little we human beings know or understand ourselves at this time—and how far we have to go, individually and en masse. As the years have passed, I’ve come to trust more and more my own insights into our behavior as a species within the framework of a nature that I believe our kind has co-created with every other species on the planet (to confine my theme to just our immediate environment for the moment). It all seems very complicated, certainly, but as I manipulate in everyday life I don’t consciously dwell upon all of the ramifications I’ve mentioned in these essays. Instead I try to hold them in the back of my mind as parts of a greater whole. So, I believe, does Jane.