“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

As Jane wrote in Chapter 1 of The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation (1977): “Seth maintains that each of us forms a psychic world view, composed of our own ideas, feelings, and beliefs, as we encounter our private corner of reality.” The world view of every creature that has ever lived continues to exist, and can be tuned into under certain conditions. So can the psychic patterns of those now living, and even of those not yet born. Yet none of this means that contact will be made directly with the creator of the world view in question—only the bank of experiences originated through that individual’s unique version of reality. And since world views are far from being static, interactions and combinations involving all time periods take place among them constantly.

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.

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.

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.

Already we’ve given up many old living patterns since Jane came home from the hospital, and in a strange way we now have the freedom to focus daily upon just a few main things. We’ve been reminded anew—more accurately, we’ve taught ourselves—that physical life itself is a wondrous medium of expression, and terrifically varied in that respect.

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!).

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.

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.

Apropos of the material I’ve been covering in these pages, I want to close this essay with quotations from two sessions that I’ve always thought are among the best Seth has given. These sessions still live, and in them he reinforces the idea that each of us does create our own reality. Both can be found in Chapter 1 of Personal Reality.