“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

She learned of the concept of sin through her intense early involvement with the Roman Catholic church. It’s easy to see how, in Jane’s case at least, the church’s teachings about sin began to grow as the innocent child started protecting her spontaneous natural mysticism—that prime attribute she’d chosen for exploration in this life. I don’t think her “sinful self” could have risen to such prominence without feeding upon those repressions, clamping down more and more within the psyche as the years passed, continuing its misguided but “well-meaning attempt to protect the creative self … to keep a hand of caution on its course lest the centuries of men’s belief in sin carried a true weight that I shared but could not comprehend.” And so, of couse, the sinful self’s own overreactions, although carried out without “malice,” became themselves a portion of Jane’s long-range learning challenges this time.

Until she became so ill that she was practically forced to go into the hospital, I’d always felt that my wife’s single-minded yet literal focus of intent was capable of lasting however long it took to reach a particular goal—whether for five minutes or fifty years. Her illness led me to question that premise, but now it’s back in place. Jane may not be always conscious of what she wants as she confronts her own projections in physical reality, but strong portions of her psyche are (and I think this applies to everyone).

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.

But that simple statement also means that our dream work relative to Jane’s challenges has often been powerfully abetted by Seth in many of the 347 completely private and 159 partially private sessions he’s given us since November 1965. Much of the fascinating and informative material in which Seth discussed various aspects of Jane’s symptoms is generalized enough for publication, and could help others, but because of its very intense personal connotations it’s a project we haven’t started yet. (Not that I haven’t presented excerpts from a few of those sessions in other Seth books.)

The morning after showing her this material, I asked Jane what she thought about such a book. “I don’t like to talk about it,” she said, “but I’ve been potting around with the idea—getting some thoughts about something like that. But I’d rather not discuss it.”

Actually, of course, each second of any creature’s life represents a creative act of the keenest sort, for it signals that physical entity’s decision to continue living in physical terms. I think Jane has made some remarkable gains since leaving the hospital. Our friends all tell her she looks better each time they see her. She has beautiful clear skin. (Irish skin, I joke with her, although she’s really but a quarter Irish.) She has additional freedom of movement in various joints, such as her knees and hips, although she’s far from being able to walk. She can now type—if rather awkwardly—perhaps half a page of copy per day. “During those frightening-enough hospital episodes I learned under combat conditions, so to speak, how to trust my body,” she wrote one day—an apt-enough analogy, I think.

She’s also done her first two colored-ink sketches, using one of the 4” × 6” watercolor pads I’d bought for her last year. In these sketches, with their simple but very effective patterns of line and primary colors, Jane somehow bypasses her everyday challenges and very clearly reflects her basically mystical view of the world. She does the same with the little poems she’s worked upon, most of which she regards as being not only incomplete but quite inconsequential: “I wouldn’t even type them up, like you did,” she commented. Yet I like lines like: “Let the dirge be heard, sweeping all things before it,” and: “I’ve developed a sense of death, when someone takes a few steps off the known path almost unknowing,” and: “I breathed in the public air and it became private.” Jane also sings in Sumari occasionally, and has written down a few short songs in that “language” without translating them. I’ve been careful to collect for our own records the prose, sketches, poetry, and Sumari she’s produced during this time of healing and testing.

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….”

She has a lesser degree of double vision these days, but still may require surgery to correct imbalances in her optic muscles. An experimental treatment that’s just been announced, involving injections into certain eye muscles of a drug derived from the toxin of botulism, may ultimately benefit her; the procedure, which apparently has no side effects, can eliminate the need for surgery by encouraging the realignment of the eyes. Jane is still very much against drugs and surgery, though—even while she’s well aware of the contradictions in her beliefs as she continues to take daily the synthetic thyroid hormone and the liquid salicylate medication prescribed by Dr. Mandali. In his session for April 16 (see the essay for the same date), Seth told us that on several occasions Jane’s thyroid gland has “repaired itself,” but we don’t think that has fully happened yet this time. In a recent private session (for May 10) Seth told us: “The gland is activating itself by itself—off and on, so to speak, giving a sputtering effect. Overall, the body is exploring the best rhythm of metabolism, and fitting itself in with the medication.”

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.

Our joint concentration has become like a brilliant light directed upon first one event and then another. Because Jane still requires regular care, our sleeping patterns remain much more evenly divided between the daylight and nighttime hours (see the essay for April 16). Since I can no longer work for hours at a time on the Seth books, or with the Seth material, I’m training myself to “put out” copy in concentrated bursts of energy that are usually of an hour’s duration, say. I work around these creative outpourings by ministering to my wife, running our house and the many errands connected with our daily living, handling our publishing affairs, seeing visitors—expected and unexpected—and trying to answer at least some of the mail, which is threatening to accumulate beyond control. Once again I’m becoming aware of my dreams, and so is Jane. I haven’t been able to get back to painting since Jane left the hospital, and I’ve had to hire help to mow the grass. Nor have I resumed the midnight walks I used to take over the hilly streets of our neighborhood; I used to look forward to seeing the shadowy deer as they moved down into the streets from the woods north of the hill house. Jane’s nurse now visits but twice a week, which is all that’s necessary (my wife’s decubiti are under control, for example).

It seems that once again we must learn the hard way that in Jane’s case any improvements we achieve are going to come from within ourselves (for I’m certainly as involved in and “responsible” for her illnesses as she is). That such feelings are rearoused in us at this time is hardly coincidental in view of our lifelong habits and belief systems; our tendencies toward secretiveness and our desires to be as self-sufficient as possible—even with Jane’s very dependent situation. Different modes of behavior don’t fit our chosen courses of action in physical life “this time.” Once again I note that in my opinion Jane’s dependency represents, at least in part, a search for a “redemption” that encompasses other motivations and realities than those concerned with “just” our temporal lives; that indeed, her impaired state grew out of her mystical nature itself (but was hardly caused by it!).

But she hasn’t begun to do so yet.

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.”