“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.

There must be a vast amount of pertinent dream information ready for the tapping, however, and maybe with Seth’s help Jane and I can eventually learn more about the undoubtedly therapeutic roles our joint and individual dreams have played as we contended with the challenges posed by her physical difficulties. Many questions arise: Even granting our personal reservations about influences being exerted within our current lives through past, future, as well as other present existences, what about exchanges on dream levels concerning Jane’s symptoms between or among any of our reincarnational selves, our counterpart selves, or various combinations of the two? How am I involved in any of these, and how are Jane’s and my families—and reaching how many generations back in ordinary time? To what extent does Jane’s physical infirmity mushroom into other probable realities through the dream state? I think that Jane herself can deal with many such questions; possibly tuning into them on her own, should she decide to, or through the mediation of her “psychic library.” A book could automatically develop out of the investigation—even, I joked with Jane, a “world-view” book.

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.

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.

At the request of Dr. Mandali, a few days ago Jane underwent her routine phlebotomy, or bloodletting, here at the house. Today (on June 18), the doctor informed us by telephone that as one result of the test we can increase Jane’s thyroid hormone dosage from 100 to 125 micrograms—a most welcome development, for we hope it will add to her daily energy. Yet there was unwelcome news, too—for the test also showed that the level of liquid salicylate medication (the aspirin substitute) in Jane’s blood is too low. She’s been taking that product four times a day for almost 16 weeks (see the first essay). Dr. Mandali instructed us to put Jane back on aspirin, to keep any arthritic pain and inflammation under control: “You can take up to sixteen tablets a day.”