“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

So, although I think that Jane has made some “remarkable gains” during recent weeks, I also think that basically she has yet to resolve the entire issue of her illnesses—or even whether to continue physical life. Seth put it beautifully a couple of months ago in the session for April 12—the first time Jane spoke for him since leaving the hospital—and I return to it again and again. See the essay for April 16: “The entire issue (of Jane’s living) had been going on for some time, and the argument—the argument being somewhat in the nature of a soul facing its own legislature, or perhaps standing as a jury before itself, setting its own case in a kind of private yet public psychic trial. Life decisions are often made in just such a fashion. With Ruburt they carried a psychic and physical logic and economy….”

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.

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.