“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When in the earlier days of our marriage I used to tell her that she had her “symptoms” regardless of what I thought or wanted, she would deny it. Yet I thought she did, and so I was driven to grope for larger understandings. I had to learn that if I shared a marriage in which my wife had developed a chronic illness, then certain portions of me had also participated in that joint creation. Eventually nothing made sense to me otherwise. I believe implicitly now that each one of us does create our own reality. “Interactions with others do occur, of course,” Seth told us long ago, “yet there are none that you do not accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions.” (In Chapter 1 of The Nature of Personal Reality, see the 613th session, for September 11, 1972.) And Jane and I are still exploring, still searching—together—for the factors within those larger frameworks of existence which make qualities like illness possible and understandable.

Throughout these essays I’ve been unable to go very far into most of the subjects Jane and I wanted to discuss, to do much more than approximate in words a welter of feelings and actions. There’s much that I haven’t even mentioned, so to that extent this record is quite incomplete. And regardless of whether our space and time are limited here, still it seems impossible to really penetrate to the deeper core of any subject or belief. Perhaps if Jane and I could do that, a great metamorphosis would take place: The closer we moved through probabilities toward All That Is, the more the tensions associated with the subject in question would transform themselves into profoundly joyous answers and challenges.

I’ve hardly mentioned our dreams. As related to Jane’s physical symptoms, they have remained largely unconscious phenomena: We knew all along that we were often having “symptom dreams,” but didn’t recall them consistently enough to be able to do much conscious work with them. That’s still the case. Obviously, we made our choices in that respect long ago: As far as the deeply charged subject of Jane’s illness was concerned, we decided to keep most of our dream work on intuitive and unconscious levels. We took from Framework 2, then, exactly what we wanted to.

Jane’s book would be called The World View of Jane Roberts, of course. And, I thought, why not? If she could tune into the world views of the philosopher and psychologist William James, and the artist Paul Cézanne, why couldn’t she do it for the writer and mystic Jane Roberts? The results would be even more intimate than those in James and Cézanne. A work like that would furnish invaluable clues concerning her redemption, on many levels, and mine as well.

“Okay,” I said. I was pleasantly surprised by her reaction, for her reluctance to talk about a certain subject often was a sign that she’d end up doing something creative with it.

For Jane’s situation continues to be a time of testing. Writing with her right hand is still quite difficult for her. She’s made no effort to learn to write with her better-functioning left hand, as I suggested she do a couple of months ago, so I’ve dropped that idea. “But I could start another book tomorrow,” she said, “only I don’t know what good it would do….”

The quotation from Seth just presented will certainly lead the reader to wonder about additional sessions we may have acquired from him since April 16, and from Jane since April 20 (see the essays for those dates). The answer is that we’ve held 13 more sessions—4 of them given by Jane “herself,” and 9 by Seth speaking through her. The last session in that baker’s dozen was delivered by Seth on June 7. Most of the sessions are rather short, and not all of them are strictly personal. For those that do concern us I’ve written lengthy notes, often recording the minutiae of our daily lives for our own reference.

Even if those sessions can’t be quoted in these essays because of the obvious space limitations, I can note that Jane and Seth each continued to develop the themes already laid down in the sessions that have been presented. What they really signify for the long term is (as I wrote in the essay for April 16) a continuing program of intense study for Jane and me—and yes, for Seth, too—as we seek to better understand our chosen commitments in our present physical lives. Our questions reflect those that everyone has, whether consciously or unconsciously—and among them is that eternally human “Why?” behind each event that we know. The material in the sessions is exhilarating, painful, enlightening, perceptive, frustrating, and maddening by turn—and sometimes, it seems, all of those things at once. We’d like to publish much of it, even though it’s hardly all flattering, and even though some of it, because of our ordinary human limitations, may not be very useful in everyday life. For if the information arouses such mixed emotions in Jane and me, surely it will do so in others too, serving as an impetus or goad to learn more even while it highlights one’s strengths and weaknesses. You create your own reality. The anger I’d felt at Jane and myself when she began recording her sinful-self material (see the essay for April 16) has long since dissipated. I won’t claim that residues of it may not be buried within my psyche (and within Jane’s), but it’s very difficult to stay mad when one agrees with the simple but most basic and profound idea that you do create your own reality.

Of course these essays reflect our particular chosen stances in life, both with and without the Seth material. I know that to some we’re sure to have appeared slow in putting to use much of the material, but in a most basic respect we’re way ahead in the situation: If we hadn’t almost instantaneously begun to encourage the flow of information from Seth when Jane started to express it some 18 years ago, and to write it down, then it wouldn’t even exist—at least in its present form. So we do take credit for doing some things right. Learning experiences can show themselves in a vast number of ways, then, and independently of sequential time, too; and if Jane and I don’t like certain aspects of the realities we’ve created, we can try to change them, together and separately.

Jane rejected that total at once, feeling it’s far too high, and announced that she’ll probably go back to her old routine of eight to ten aspirin a day. We’re angry and dismayed. It’s very unsettling for us to learn that the prescribed medication isn’t doing its job after all. It is, I remarked somewhat bitterly, another sign of the frustrating, mixed results one must learn to expect, at least in some instances, from the imperfect practice of medicine. To treat rheumatoid arthritis with aspirin? We’d always found that incredible. Yet it’s still the best way to go, Dr. Mandali said, even with the new anti-inflammatory, nonsteroidal drugs that the FDA (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) has released to the marketplace recently, for often they produce more side effects than aspirin. And her advice is reinforced by published material I’ve collected lately for our files.

But she hasn’t begun to do so yet.

I should add that I don’t think Jane has started to “set … aside” the medical interpretation regarding her “arthritis situation,” as Seth suggested she might do when he came through on April 12. (That session is presented in the essay for April 16.) Any decision Jane makes about altering the deeply set beliefs involved in her condition will require the cooperation of a number of portions of her psyche, including her sinful self, and it appears that at this time neither of us is ready to try achieving that kind of overall effect. Our fear of failure undoubtedly plays a strong part here. Ironically, Jane’s sinful self is one of the main creators of and participants in her illness syndrome, so any beneficial changes she can bring about will first call for a major shift in the attitude of that very stubborn portion of her psyche. It will be a triumph indeed if and when we can create an alteration like that. And all of this presupposes that each of us will be ready to draw “new facts” into our daily lives from Framework 2.

At my age (63), then, I’m learning once again that I can’t live Jane’s life for her, or protect her from the motivations of her own physical and psychic explorations and choices, no matter how much I may want to. Nor could she do that for me. On many levels that kind of psychic interference is quite simply ignored by the individual in question, and rightly so. Jane’s determination would see to her own protection in any case. And her innate mystical nature must fully know and accept that the time, manner, and method of her physical death, whenever it occurs, is as much a part of her body’s life as its life is. I deeply believe that her psyche would insist that she doesn’t need any sort of basic protection by me (or anyone else) to begin with—only understanding. I live daily with the proposition that my wife is in the process of making profound decisions, and that once she’s made them she’ll respond accordingly both physically and mentally.

In that sense Jane’s whole self or entity accepts her actions completely, as part of the learning processes available to “it” through her individuality—nor do I mean it does so in any passive or remote sense at all, but in the most intimate, sensitive terms possible, and also, probably, in ways we cannot appreciate now. At that moment of joining with her whole self, whenever her “death” does take place, all will be resolved with the finest creativity and understanding, for I believe that Jane herself will certainly continue “living” as an individual.

I also believe that these kinds of challenges—involving decisions about whether to continue physical life—have always existed for every creature on earth (just as they have for the earth itself as a living entity). Jane and I have no idea of how our personal story is going to work out, but we do want to tell it.

From Session 610 for June 7, 1972: “You always know what you are doing, even when you do not realize it. Your eye knows it sees, though it cannot see itself except through the use of reflection. In the same way the world as you see it is a reflection of what you are, a reflection not in glass but in three-dimensional reality. You project your thoughts, feelings, and expectations outward, then you perceive them as the outside reality. When it seems to you that others are observing you, you are observing yourself from the standpoint of your own projections.”

And from Session 613 for September 11, 1972: “Interactions with others do occur, of course, yet there are none that you do not accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions. This applies in each area of life. In your terms, it applies both before life and after it. In the most miraculous fashion you are given the gift of creating your experience.”