“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

August 12, 1982. Originally I’d planned to write the standard kind of introduction for Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment. However, as I became involved in describing the complicated, emotionally charged series of events surrounding the hospitalization earlier this year of my wife, Jane Roberts, the material automatically began organizing itself into a series of dated essays. I was more than happy to follow this intuition from my creative self, for it answered many questions I’d started to consciously worry about.

We could have presented Dreams as is, or at least have avoided mentioning certain less-than-advantageous circumstances surrounding its production by Jane and by Seth, the “energy personality essence” she speaks for while in a trance or dissociated state. The facts are, though, that Jane’s already impaired physical condition grew steadily worse while she was working on the book. Shortly after finishing it, she went into the hospital. Since we’ve always wanted to make sure that our “psychic work” is given within the context of our daily living, I’ve undertaken to present in these essays intensely personal material relevant to the creation of Dreams. (The mechanics of Jane’s still-fascinating trance phenomenon have been described in some detail in the six previous Seth books she’s produced—with my help—and they’ll also be referred to, if briefly, in Dreams.)

Moreover, the choice of presenting the material in essay form proved to have one virtue that was more valuable than all the others combined: It allowed us to delve into the events I describe, and “our deep-seated, sometimes wrenching feelings connected to them,” a little bit at a time. Those situations might have been too devastating for us otherwise, too emotionally threatening, too charged for us to present them with at least the minimum amount of objectivity required by the written word. Many of the events and feelings evoked such deep implications of trial and challenge for Jane and me that we were often left with strong feelings of unreality: This can’t be happening to us. At our ages (52 and 62, Jane and I, respectively), why have we created lives with such nightmarish connotations? Why do I have to leave my dear wife alone in the hospital each night, so that I feel like crying for her when I go to bed by myself in the hill house? Why can’t we be left alone to live lives of peace and creativity? And how many millions and millions of times through the ages have other human beings on this planet felt the same way—and will yet? Why are our lives ending like this, when we feel that simply getting through each day is an accomplishment?

[...] “But in spite of everything, over all those years I never felt sick until I went into the hospital,” she wailed. [...] Somebody at the hospital —I forget who—told us that joint replacements for the fingers and/or knuckles usually weren’t all that successful: The bones in the hands were pretty small and delicate. [...]

As I wrote in the first essay, “the trouble with having something diagnosed as rheumatoid arthritis is that not only do you have it when you go into the hospital, but when you leave it.” [...] And Jane, trying to protect herself from the negative suggestions that had been administered to her like psychic hammerblows, ever since she’d entered the hospital, could only weakly demur on the subject of operations.

[...] Presenting the session in a more isolated manner here, then, may give the reader a clearer idea of how we felt during Jane’s early days in the hospital [and later too, for that matter]. [...]

So last night, less than two days after she’d held her last session, I asked Jane for some material about the central theme of her days in the hospital, both from her own viewpoint and that of the doctors who probed, examined, and discussed her and her problems. [...]

I should note, by the way, that her bedsores weren’t infected when she went into the hospital, but were less than a week later. [...] “If the infection in that ulcer on your coccyx reaches the bone, it means at least a six-week stay in the hospital,” exclaimed Jane’s principal doctor, Rita Mandali (not her real name). [...] And I began to read up on how many kinds of staphylococcus bacteria alone there are, and indeed how common infections are in hospitals, since by their very nature those institutions are far from being the cleanest in town….

That evocative, prophetic line is from a Sumari song that Jane sang to herself a few days before she went into an Elmira, New York, hospital on February 26, 1982. [...] Its indescribable depth of feeling was remarkably prescient in light of the events in our lives that preceded—and then followed—the hospital experience that affected us so much.

Indeed, I didn’t learn that Jane had made the tape until five weeks later, after she’d returned to our hill house from the hospital: I found it on March 30, amid others in her writing room. [...]

Jane has been home from the hospital since last Sunday, March 28. [...]

[...] Without being aware of it, I’d begun to lose weight after she was admitted to the hospital, and by now my loss had reached the point where others began to notice it. [...] I became extremely busy after my wife came home, making what seemed like endless calls and trips about getting prescriptions filled, about trying out various kinds of beds and mattresses and chairs and hospital gowns, about insurance, about a commode, about having a speaker phone hooked up to our regular phone so that Jane wouldn’t have to hold the standard bulky handset to her ear. [...]

Yesterday, Sunday, had marked the end of Jane’s first week home from the hospital. [...]

[...] To our dismay, we discovered that Jane had lost much of the use of her legs while in the hospital, since during that month she’d been actively discouraged from using them in her accustomed way. [...]

The next few days, in mid-February 1982, found me determined to clear up the hearing problem—and on one level at least, it was that determination that led me finally to the hospital’s emergency room. We had no family doctor to call upon, but through the invaluable help of a dear friend who was also a nurse, we set up an appointment with a doctor at the hospital.

[...] We were pleased to get it for, as I told Jane, if ever we’re to understand all of the events in our lives that led to the hospital experience, we must call upon every ability at our service. [...]

[...] Therefore, a kind of momentary gap appeared between his life and his living of it—a pause and a hesitation became obvious between his life and what he should do with it, as his condition showed just before the hospital hiatus.

[...] We decided to outline our story here instead, and to carry it through the hospital experience, since that was its logical outcome. [...]

[...] I think Jane has made some remarkable gains since leaving the hospital. [...] “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.

Just over nine weeks have passed now since I brought my wife home from the hospital. [...]

Until she became so ill that she was practically forced to go into the hospital, I’d always felt that my wife’s single-minded yet literal focus of intent was capable of lasting however long it took to reach a particular goal—whether for five minutes or fifty years. [...]

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. [...]

[...] How different her singing is now from that very mournful Sumari song she’d recorded last February, a few days before going into the hospital. [...]

[...] Once again, however, she shied away from translating any more of that dirgelike Sumari song she’d sung to herself, and recorded, shortly before going into the hospital. [...]

[...] If I’d felt I was suffering a heart attack, for example, I knew I would rush to the hospital, but this was a chronic condition. [...]

[...] The increase followed the positive results of a blood test the doctor had ordered a few days previously: A hospital technician had come to our hill house to draw blood from Jane—performing a “phlebotomy service.” [...]

[...] Forty-one days have now passed since Jane left the hospital, and this passage of “time” alone has given us more perspective on the whole affair of her illness, and on our beliefs, intents, and desires.