“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the first essay I referred to Jane’s unique combination of stubbornness, innocence, and mysticism, and in that respect nothing has changed. In spite of her horror at the medical practices and suggestions she’s encountered, and in spite of her dismay at the physical damage the arthritis has caused in her temporal body, Jane will give up nothing until she—and/or her whole self—get out of the entire illness syndrome exactly what she wants to get. She has an incredible stubborn patience with physical life. This quality has sustained her throughout all of her challenges as well as her successes, and I think it must have been particularly important during her early frightening years with her mother, Marie. Her determination even shows somehow in photographs taken when she was of preschool age. Jane learned to refuse to strike back at the invalid Marie’s rage and sarcasm, to inhibit her spontaneity and impulses, and so habits of repression entered in. Yet she was—and is—free of guile and sophistication.

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.

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.

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.

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….”

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 times Jane still becomes depressed, just as she still dozes in her chair. While at work in my own writing room I occasionally hear her talking to herself as she sits at her card table in the living room, just down the hall: I’ve learned that on such occasions, she’s asleep and often dreaming aloud, solving the psychological equations continually arising among the levels of her psyche as she pursues her chosen learning processes. I help her as much as I can. While I spend all of this time working on these essays for Dreams, I’m always afraid I’m leaving her alone too much. Jane does get lonely, she says.

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.

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!).

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.