“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.)

I worked on the essays in succession, just as they’re given here, although I found myself adding to the earlier ones as I moved into the later ones. In terms of length alone, it soon became obviously impossible to write all of the material for any piece on the date given. Even by going back over them, however, I couldn’t discuss everything I wanted to: The essays could have easily grown into a book of their own. This weaving things together to make them “fit” is only natural for one of my temperament, but I didn’t alter any of my original copy—that I’d have refused to do—and I kept intact those first spontaneous descriptions of the events attendant to Jane’s physical difficulties, as well as our deep-seated, sometimes wrenching feelings connected to them. I did not look at Seth-Jane’s Dreams itself while writing the essays, in order to avoid having them overly influenced by work in the book. Instead, we want all of this preliminary material to show how we live daily—regardless of how well we may or may not do—with a generalized knowledge of, and belief in, the Seth material.

Seth, then, has finished his work on Dreams. I wrote the original version of the notes for each book session as he delivered it through Jane, and also began collecting other notes and reference material that might be used. Since I’ve completed the essays, all I have to do now is “refine” the session notes (and addenda) as I type the finished manuscript. Jane will help as much as she can. We expect to have the book ready for our editors, Tam Mossman and Lynne Lumsden, by the end of the year.

Jane appreciates that the dates I’m always giving merely furnish a convenient framework for our material, but she’s hardly enamored of such precise methodology; she understands that it’s my way of doing things, realizes it’s very useful, and goes on from there. I use a similar system in presenting all of the published Seth material. It has the great attribute of allowing for quick reference timewise (if not always by subject matter) to any of the more than 1,500 regular, private or deleted, and “ESP class” sessions Jane has given over the past 19 years—until July 1982, that is, when I began work on these passages.

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.

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. [...] 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. [...] 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.

[...] 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). [...] 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. [...] Jane’s nurse now visits but twice a week, which is all that’s necessary (my wife’s decubiti are under control, for example).

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. [...] 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.”

Some of our other books contain more information on how Jane grew up fatherless, and with a Marie who soon became bedridden and embittered. Mother and child were supported by welfare, and assisted over the years by a series of itinerant housekeepers—a number of these were prostitutes who, according to Jane, were periodically thrown out of “work” when town officials would shut down the “houses,” try to clean up gambling, and so forth. [...] (She would terrify the young Jane by stuffing cotton in her mouth and pretending she’d committed suicide, for example.) Jane also spent time in a strictly run Catholic orphanage. [...] Her mother died in 1972, at the same age; Jane, who hadn’t seen Marie for a number of years, did not attend the funeral. [...]

In our ceaseless search for answers to an unending list of personal questions, we discussed the notion that in her own way Jane has described a circle from her childhood: Her parents, Marie and Delmer, were married in Saratoga Springs, a well-known resort town in upper New York State, in 1928. They were divorced in 1931, when Jane was two years old. (Jane didn’t see her father again—he came from a broken home himself—until she was 21.) By the time Jane was three years old, her mother was having serious problems with rheumatoid arthritis. [...]

[...] In physical terms, then, I think it quite possible that in Jane’s case long-term stress, beginning in her early childhood, consistently overstimulated her immune system. Over and over Marie told Jane that she was no good, that the daughter’s birth had caused the mother’s illness. Well before she was 10 years old Jane had developed persistent symptoms of colitis, an inflammation of the large intestine/bowel that is often associated with emotional stress. [...] Finally in her mid-30s there came the beginning of rheumatoid arthritis: Jane’s immune system greatly increased its attack upon her body.

[...] “But the benefits are still weeks away,” she told Jane. 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.” Now Jane must have such a test before each increase in her thyroid medication.

Jane’s hearing is much improved after treatment with decongestants and a pair of minor operations in which tiny drainage tubes were inserted through her eardrums—the procedure is called surery—to relieve internal blockage. Jane’s thyroid gland, Dr. Mandali finally told her, has simply ceased functioning, so the doctor has begun a program of cautiously rejuvenating my wife’s endocrine system, and thus all of her bodily processes, with a synthetic thyroid hormone in pill form (a low 50 micrograms to start). Jane is to take these pills for the rest of her life. [...] Dr. Mandali has prescribed drops to keep Jane’s eyes lubricated, and a liquid salicylate medication (as a substitute for aspirin) to control joint pain and inflammation. [...] The increased glandular activity is also expected to have some beneficial effects upon Jane’s arthritis, and possibly upon her anemia (a condition that often accompanies arthritis). I asked that she be tested for food allergies, since I’d read that reactions to various foods and additives can trigger arthritis, but Dr. Mandali said that “if Jane is allergic she (Jane) would know it”—a position I came to most thoroughly disagree with. [...]

[...] Although she’s not entirely in agreement with me on this point, I think that essentially Jane is a mystic—not an easy thing to be in our extroverted, materialistic society, for it represents a way of life that’s little understood these days. [...] Mysticism is still overwhelmingly regarded as a profoundly religious expression, and one that’s hardly practical, but in my opinion neither of those situations applies to Jane. [...] There’s nothing halfway about Jane. [...]

Jane and I didn’t know whether the doctors we did business with even knew what a trance state was. I envisioned some hilarious episodes during which Seth, speaking through Jane, would try to explain to gatherings of medical people just who he was and what he believed. Next, he’d go into what Jane and I believed, and why. [...]

As the days passed Jane kept putting me off about doing the translation, until finally I grew resentful and despairing at her refusal to cooperate. [...] I’d seen Jane operate in that fashion before, and I knew she’d have her way.

(8:47 A.M. Our original idea was to insert the session Jane gave this morning in one of the earlier essays. [...] After Jane came through with her dictation I told myself I’d know what to do with it, and awoke the next morning with the clear understanding that her session should be presented just as is, and when we received it. Jane said okay. [...] 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]. [...]

Actually, I came to realize, Jane was so terrified by the thought of those operations that mentally she shunted aside all such prospects. [...] Jane cried. [...] “Oh, they’d operate on the shoulders, too,” a doctor told me in front of Jane, without inflection, as though we were discussing an inanimate mechanism that needed rebuilding. [...] But it could well be argued that Jane needed to be able to write with a pen or pencil, to express her basic creativity in that particular elementary fashion, even more than she needed to walk. [...]

[...] The exception was the youngish doctor Jane had referred to at the very end of her last session. [...] He’d offered Jane encouragement as she is, and she had felt an immediate psychic rapport with him. But he was a neurologist, and we saw less and less of him as it was determined that his special skills wouldn’t be of continuing help in Jane’s situation. In the overwhelming medical view, then, as Jane said, the operations were the only way for her to go….

[...] Even if Jane had all of those operations—even if she ended up able to walk after a fashion—she’d still have arthritis. [...] “Your joints are destroyed,” Dr. Mandali told Jane, after getting the opinion of the young out-of-town rheumatologist she’d asked to examine my wife. [...] 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.

At the end of May and early in June 1981 we published two books involving years of effort: Seth-Jane’s The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, and Jane’s The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto. I was positive that those volumes contained much excellent work. I was also positive that with their publication, Jane’s symptoms—especially her walking difficulties—became considerably worse. [...] Perhaps, I thought, that portion was creating a physical disability that allowed Jane to publish forbidden material while protectively isolating herself—and me—from rejection by the physical world. [...]

And as for books, early in August I returned to our publisher, Prentice-Hall, the page proofs Jane had corrected for her book of poetry: If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love. Ordinarily that event would have delighted us, since it meant that before the year was out she’d have another work published. [...] Jane held a few widely scattered sessions for Dreams, and a number of private ones as fall came, then winter. [...] Finally, early in December 1981 I told Jane I was on the verge of refusing to sit with her for any sessions at all, regular or private, for I’d become deeply afraid that the more sessions she held the worse she’d get. [...] At this time, Prentice-Hall sent us the first published copies of If We Live Again, but as proud as Jane and I are of that book, its appearance didn’t help her. [...]

[...] 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. [...] Jane went into trance as easily as ever, but her Seth voice contained the same underlying tremor I’ve noticed on a number of occasions since she’s returned home. Remember that in the following excerpts Seth—who claims to be discarnate—calls Jane by her male “entity name,” Ruburt, and thus “he” and “him.”)

After the session I began to wonder what Jane’s “sinful self” would have to say now, in comparison to the material she’d received from it in June 1981. [...] Both of us had been appalled at the revelations coming through Jane’s pen, even if we did grudgingly admit that we understood, intellectually at least, many of the points that self made. I’d grown very angry as the material unfolded—angry at that portion of Jane’s psyche for clinging so tenaciously to such a set of beliefs, for whatever reasons, and angry at myself for not understanding any better than she did their extent and depth, and just how damaging they could be in ordinary terms. [...]

Yesterday, Sunday, had marked the end of Jane’s first week home from the hospital. [...] Jane herself was displaying a stoicism (I’m afraid to write “acceptance”) regarding her condition that I’d have found unendurable were I the one experiencing it. [...] Not that I wanted Jane to be magically transformed into a 25-year-old again—just that I ached to see a resurgence of that uninhibited, unplanned joy of motion for its own sake. [...]

[...] 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. [...] We’d scheduled just a two-hour visit by a registered nurse five afternoons a week for Jane’s physical therapy, and to change the dressings on her decubiti. [...] I, for one, was afraid that such an arrangement would not only demonstrate our acceptance of the fact that Jane was really caught in a terrible, permanent situation, but that it would end up destroying us psychologically and creatively.

Jane struggled to regain strength in her legs. [...] 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. [...] When I began sleeping on the couch in the living room, where it was quieter and darker, we bought a pair of wireless intercoms so that Jane could call me from her bed at any time. [...]

(7:15 P.M. Our next “Jane session” took place four days later, on the date shown above. [...] And once again Jane wavered at times between waking and dozing. [...]

[...] In a way, and in those terms, this also applies in Jane’s case when she contacts Seth, even on the “psychological bridge” those two have constructed between them: When Seth tells us that his last physical life was in Denmark in the 1600s, then Jane and I represent future physical selves of his. [...] (This time, see Appendix 18 for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality.) Yet we are all of us different now: “Ruburt (Jane) is not myself now, in his present life. [...]

[...] Consciously, however, Jane has never been overly enthusiastic about the idea of reincarnation to begin with. [...] Jane does believe that long ago she left behind the church’s dogmas on reincarnation. [...] (As for myself, while growing up I knew nothing of reincarnation beyond its name.) But we’ll be the first ones to agree that in certain Seth sessions, and in her very evocative poetry, Jane has encouraged her intuitive and creative selves to seriously discuss reincarnation. [...]

We’ve presented lengthy quotations from Seth on his Framework 1 and Framework 2 material both in his Mass Events and in Jane’s God of Jane. His discussions on the subject are an excellent example of how a very creative idea, capable of helping many people, can arise from an attempt to deal with a personal situation—for on September 17, 1977, Seth introduced his Frameworks 1 and 2 concept in a private session designed to help Jane contend with her physical symptoms.

Early in this essay (which I began on May 7, 1982), I mentioned the series of sessions Seth gave in 1980 on his magical approach to reality, and the different approaches Jane and I took toward doing books on the subject. [...] Then when Seth and Jane both came through with material on her sinful self (see Essay No. [...] Jane didn’t return to work on Dreams until July 1981, when the two blocks of sinful-self material had run their courses. [...]

This whole miniature tempest is almost enough to make one wonder: How come those other people made their “Seths” known after Jane began to speak for her Seth, and to publish the Jane-Seth material? [...] But to claim to speak for Jane’s Seth per se, as a means of expression, is quite another thing….

[...] Later tonight I want to offer a little more about this overall development—but people speak for their Seths entirely without Jane’s permission. Jane is most concerned that she and I protect the integrity of the Seth material in its unique and original form.

Concerning Jane’s understandable desire to protect her work, long ago she published some very clear statements about that. [...] And in her introduction to Seth Speaks (1972), she quoted Seth from the 510th session for January 19, 1970: “While my communications will come exclusively through Ruburt (Jane) at all times, to protect the integrity of the material, I will invite the reader to become aware of me as a personality….”

Even in God of Jane, which was published in 1981, Jane presented some relatively late material from Seth to show that he doesn’t independently communicate with others. [...]

[...] Jane spontaneously gave voice to her song yesterday afternoon while sitting in the glass-enclosed front porch of our hill house. [...] (The whole series has taken much longer than I expected it to, though.) I only know that Jane began to sing in very melodious tones that flowed through the house. [...] And that present clarity of voice, almost free of tremor, showed how much Jane has improved since returning home. [...]

Finally, since I opened the first essay with a line from one of Jane’s songs in Sumari, I think it appropriate to close the last essay with Sumari, too.

Jane didn’t tape this new Sumari, though—which we regretted—for she wasn’t able to get out of her chair to hunt for her recorder; I was too charmed just listening to her sing to think of a tape. [...]

(7:30 P.M. After supper I told Jane I was going to work on the essays for Dreams. [...] Jane said she’d like to do some more dictation of her own, so I agreed to take down that instead. [...]

[...] Jane was nodding in her chair as I finished, and I thought she wouldn’t be doing any work this evening after all. [...]

[...] Jane spoke with much emphasis here. [...]

[...] “End of introduction,” Jane abruptly said. [...]