“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.)

Jane’s book would be called The World View of Jane Roberts, of course. And, I thought, why not? If she could tune into the world views of the philosopher and psychologist William James, and the artist Paul Cézanne, why couldn’t she do it for the writer and mystic Jane Roberts? The results would be even more intimate than those in James and Cézanne. A work like that would furnish invaluable clues concerning her redemption, on many levels, and mine as well.

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.

(Which makes us wonder: Just how will Jane’s body let us know when it finally wants to divest itself entirely of the thyroid supplement? We’re telling ourselves that that little challenge will automatically work itself out at the right time. We haven’t posed the question to Seth.)

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.

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).

“I probably didn’t want to write any more,” she dictated in her own session for May 27. “I feared I’d lost all inspiration—that 20 years of answers weren’t enough, and that perhaps my life had no place to go if that were the case. I plan to work with the rest of that sinful-self material….”

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.