“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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?

That basic impetus toward survival came to take precedence over everything else. Indeed, for several weeks following the initiation of the challenges I relate in the essays, supposedly creative activities like writing books and painting pictures often faded into insignificance by comparison. And for me, Jane’s condition came to stand for everything we don’t know in our particular joint, chosen, probable earthly reality.

The essays contain many insights into the meanings the whole experience with illness has had for us, and will continue to have for many years. Our lives have been irrevocably changed—by choice—and not for the worse, either. Jane and I used our wills to intensify our focuses in certain areas. And I’m sure that as the reader works his or her way through the essays, it will become quite apparent that I wrote them just as much for Jane and me as I did for others—all in our ceaseless attempts to better understand, to grasp a bit more firmly, those mental and physical adventures that we’re trying to delve into “this time around.”

[...] In Chapter Nine of The Seth Material (1970) she wrote: “Several people have told me that Seth communicated with them through automatic writing, but Seth denies any such contacts, saying that his communications will be limited to his work with me, in order that the integrity of the Seth Material be preserved.” 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….”

Doctors had terrified me as a child, when my mother was already bedridden with arthritis, and when I was diagnosed as having an overactive thyroid gland—an affliction that could lead, so my mother told me, to insanity and death. [...]

[...] As he has said so many times, Seth speaks only through me, to protect the integrity of the material. And it is indeed that contract between him and me that always assures you of the authenticity of Seth’s work.

(9:10.) Seth couldn’t lead my life for me, of course. [...]

[...] Let people talk around me, I thought: I no longer cared. [...] Here was no gentle lulling silence, for the absence of sound frightened me beyond anything I could remember. [...] Did he stand protectively just behind my chair, ready to help me in my maneuvers into bed, or was he in the kitchen, rooms away? [...] I remember somehow equating all the silence about me with a forbidding white wall. And in parentheses: (I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did.) I couldn’t die deaf (Jane said with a laugh at 11:45). I think I had imagined that everything would shut down gradually. [...]

[...] For another, when Seth was more than three-quarters of the way through Dreams he began devoting a series of private sessions to an in-depth discussion of “the magical approach”—material that was calculated to help me personally, and others like me, change our approach to experience and thus experience itself. [...]

I could feel Rob hoping that my own efforts would help me. In a hundred ways he tried his best to help me on his own. [...]

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. [...]

[...] With a more painful heart I yearned for my wife to walk to me, hips innocently and joyfully swaying, as she used to do years ago, when she’d meet me every day as I left the printing company where I worked as a commercial artist. [...]

In later years it’s become impossible for me to close my eyes to the multiple pressing differences that exist between Seth’s explanation of the nature of reality, and of our own private experience of it. [...]

(Long pause at 7:51.) It began to strike me that even my own physical incapacities were indeed creative ventures that appeared in my experience as bad, or limiting, or even tragic. [...]

[...] She was tired, and I was far from being at my best as I fought off a half-repressed cough—an affliction that seldom troubles me.)

[...] She roused herself enough to stubbornly maintain that she’d give me more later. [...] I also knew that my wife feared the effect of the message upon me—for what could the phrase she’d already given me mean, except that her soul had at least considered the possibility of leaving her physical body, perhaps to find shelter in a nonphysical realm? [...]

Lest I give an inaccurate picture of my wife, however, let me add that she combines instances of that seeming intransigence with a profound intuitive innocence before nature (and thus All That Is), and with a great literal acceptance of nature’s manifestations and of her own being and creations within that framework. 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. [...] It took me a long time to realize this. [...]

[...] No instructions were given to me except to close my eyes as the test progressed. [...] The obvious unconcern on the part of that middle-aged female attendant made me furious.

[...] It reminded me at once of a dirge or an elegy, and I felt chills as I began to intuitively understand just how meaningful it was, even without any translation at all.

Several of the brightest young rheumatologists and orthopedic surgeons had my future all mapped out for me, or so it appeared, as they discussed my case. When they spoke to Rob and me I tried to listen, but my hearing was still so poor that it was nearly impossible to make out one full sentence at a time. [...] But one doctor soberly told me that I’d never walk again, or even put my weight upon my feet again, unless I underwent a series of joint-replacement operations—if, he cautioned, I proved to be a “proper candidate.”

It seemed to me that once medical science got hold of you it wanted to justify its existence, to exercise its wonders for those fortunate or unfortunate enough to be considered “proper candidates” for its full ministrations.

[...] (We didn’t have nearly enough money, but could qualify for adequate insurance by fulfilling the terms of an 11-month waiting period.) But regardless of cost, one orthopedist saw me staying right in the hospital—now that I was there—until the entire procedure was finished. [...]

(A one-minute pause at 9:13, eyes blinking, then closing.) One doctor told me that my body’s mobility would be bound to change for the better as my thyroid gland …

[...] I hadn’t asked her to do a song for this last essay; she told me afterward that she hadn’t realized I was that close to finishing it. [...]

[...] When she read it to me I knew at once that it would go here, for a few words she certainly sang of the basic theme of these essays—of the sublime, immortal consciounesses of the earth and All That Is, of that loving redemption that consciousness always makes possible somehow, somewhere, in the eternal private world of each of us, and that each of us always seeks:

[...] I still had only that one great line she’s interpreted for me in English: “Let my soul find shelter elsewhere.”

(Long pause at 7:34.) His ideas had somehow led me to the point where the very dimensions of experience should change. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] Nor could she do that for me. [...] 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. [...]

[...] Her illness led me to question that premise, but now it’s back in place. [...]

[...] Also, she’s indulged in long conversations with me—and on occasion with certain friends—when we apparently were present in out-of-body states. Related here are actions she thought she was participating in with me, say, yet when she “woke up,” she discovered we hadn’t done any of those things. [...] “I don’t know what I was doing in my chair,” she said at 11:05 A.M. yesterday; she’d fallen asleep after telling me she had to use the commode. “I don’t like the way the thyroid business is making me feel…. [...]

[...] To me, redemption means a continuous search or journey, then, involving whatever events and interchanges we choose to create, for whatever purposes, along the way—and truly, I think, some of those purposes will involve things “the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive.” [...]

[...] As a very perceptive young lady wrote Jane and me recently, why can’t people be progressed to their future lives just as successfully as they’re regressed to their past lives? [...]

[...] Yet our mass reality obviously is large enough to allow me room to generate such fanatical thoughts….

(I’ll add that both Seth and quantum theory predict the spontaneous creation of particles of matter out of or in “empty” space—events that, it seems to me, go against some of the laws of conservation. [...]

Some of our readers, sending us recent books and copies of articles written by scientists working on these subjects, have noted that it must be nice for Jane and me to have concepts that Seth has been discussing for years “corroborated” by the establishment (often we already had the material on file, by the way). [...]

To me, consciousness or All That Is is an omnipresent, really indescribable awareness that to us human beings has no limits, “one” containing not only the attributes of time and space and of all feeling, thought, and objectivity, but numberless other properties, manifestations, and probabilities that lie outside our very limited interior and exterior perceptions. [...]

[...] This, to me, is an example of the way a course of probable activity can be agreed upon by all involved.