“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?

Maybe I’d produced all I was meant to. Maybe the fire of my life was coming to its own natural conclusion. [...] Maybe that course was better than the determination and painful discomforts that might be necessary to prolong lifely existence. So I was to some extent only half alarmed to hear from some strange inner existence my own voice slow down. Tremors appeared in it, as if the vowels and symbols had endless gaps—uneven edges—and some part of me was escaping like smoke even between my words.

If earlier, however, Ruburt had the erroneous idea that he was going too fast—or would or could—and had to restrain himself and exert caution, now he received the medical prognosis, the “physical proof” that such was not the case, and in fact that the opposite was true: He was too slow. [...] And if once a doctor had told him years ago how excellent was his hearing, the medical profession now told him that his slowness (his thyroid deficiency) had helped impair his hearing to an alarming degree.

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. On the surface at least, it was as though some powerful portion of her psyche were exacting a grim compensation for the books’ appearance in the marketplace. 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. [...]

Actually, I was amazed at the opacity of my perception: It seemed that once again I was just beginning to understand that Jane had chosen to embark upon a journey in which she would explore herself and the world in intensely physical and emotional terms—in contrast to the more intellectual ways by which she and I have usually conducted our searches, through the Seth material and our own inquiring minds…. I was frightened by her resolve, and by my own acquiescent participation in such a plan. [...]

[...] I only saw that she could use the rest, since she obviously didn’t feel well generally—but I also thought she was waiting for one of her characteristic surges of creative energy before digging into her next book (of which she always has several going). Our agreement was that in the meantime she was to start checking the sessions and my notes for Dreams; then I was to type the final manuscript. [...]

After some hesitation following my question about having a session this evening, Jane decided she wanted to contribute introductory material for Dreams. This was to be a new experience for us: Because of the arthritis she was having trouble even holding a pen, so she intended to dictate her material as though she were writing it herself in longhand. I was to take it down for her. [...]

(With a laugh at 7:51:) Later that same bare backside, thin and bony, was pressed against another metal table, while this time electrodes were attached to every available area of my head so that an electroencephalogram could be taken. [...] (Pause.) Some kind of white gum, or glue, had been rubbed into my scalp through my hair to improve the electrical contacts, and when the test was finished the attendant simply grabbed one area of the equipment and pulled the entire mess off my head in one motion—which felt like my entire scalp was coming off. [...]

[...] Yet there was, I knew, a fellowship even in those processes—one that I had perhaps too long ignored: the quality of fellowship, as a species or a family or a community comes together to help one of its own kind. And as I was to see, even for all of the pessimistic suggestions of medical science itself, in the very middle of crisis there was a certain indisputable sense of cooperation—a “vulgar” physical optimism, and a kind of humor that I had long forgotten existed.

[...] Jane was nodding in her chair as I finished, and I thought she wouldn’t be doing any work this evening after all. [...] Her voice was free of tremor and her rate of delivery was a little slow.)

[...] Certainly our comprehensions have deepened as a result—yet in the face of that great promise, what was I doing barely able to leave my chair? And if spontaneous order was such a vital ingredient in the workings of the universe, then what was I doing trying to shut it down in my own daily life?

There is no doubt that I was caught between life’s contrasts, and only too aware of the endless questions that came to mind. On the one hand there was the Seth material itself, and Seth’s performance in his books.

(7:30 P.M. After supper I told Jane I was going to work on the essays for Dreams. [...]

[...] The exception was the youngish doctor Jane had referred to at the very end of her last session. As it happened, he was the one who’d had her admitted to the hospital to begin with. [...] 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. [...]

[...] True, the amount of money required for such surgical possibilities was staggering, but insurance of one kind or another could be found to carry the cost. (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. [...]

Actually, I came to realize, Jane was so terrified by the thought of those operations that mentally she shunted aside all such prospects. Only when she was home did she begin to fathom the possible depths of the physical reality she’d created for herself, with my help. To coin a phrase, she was “truly, deeply shocked.” [...]

[...] 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. [...]

There was no doubt that we’d been reading ourselves “wrong.” There was no doubt as far as I was concerned that every one of our standard explanations for life (pause) were relatively useless now, regardless of how much they might have helped or hindered us in the past.

[...] To see my wonderful, lovely wife so reduced to her present near-helpless state was almost more than I could bear. 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. [...] For now I understood that freedom of motion was at least one true reflection of an individual’s creative potential.

[...] 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. [...] We even had a small remote-controlled television set installed in our bedroom so that she could watch it, say, when she was restless during the night. 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. [...]

[...] 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.)

[...] Seth was right: I was going too slow—not too fast, as I had feared. I had calmed myself down too far, disciplined myself overmuch, until my only hope was to change my course at once.

[...] 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. [...]

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. [...]

[...] The company that published my books, Prentice-Hall, was changing its structure and policy. My longtime friend and editor there, Tam Mossman, was considering leaving to work for another publishing firm. [...]

[...] Until a very few years ago it was medical dogma that the immune system was entirely independent of any “outside” influence. [...] 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. [...] Marie—and others—told her that she would burn herself out and die before she was 20 years old. Her vision was poor; she required very strong glasses (which she seldom wore). [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] Marie was a brilliant, angry woman who lived in near-constant pain, and who regularly abused her daughter through behavior that, if not psychotic, was certainly close to it. [...] Her father died in 1971, when he was 68. [...]

[...] (As closely as we can determine, Marie was about 26 years old at their onset. Jane was 35; she’ll be 53 tomorrow.)

[...] The day was mild and sunny and breezy, and I’d opened all of the windows for her. [...] 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. [...] “Oh, your singing is so clear and sweet!” her visiting nurse had exclaimed the other day, when my wife had begun to sing while the nurse was changing the dressings on her decubiti. [...]

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. [...]

[...] She was brought up as a Roman Catholic, and more than passionately embraced that faith. Yet she was early subjected to the church’s rigid opposition to the whole idea of reincarnation because, strangely enough, even in her very youthful poetry she dealt with the forbidden subject (although not by name). [...] This is very evident in her second and latest book of poetry, If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love, which was published in December of last year (1981). [...]

[...] 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. [...] He is nevertheless an extension and materialization of the Seth that I was at one time.”

[...] That was to be expected, of course, for by then our concentration was directed almost wholly into the area of symptoms. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] Her determination even shows somehow in photographs taken when she was of preschool age. [...] Yet she was—and is—free of guile and sophistication.

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. [...]

[...] I was pleasantly surprised by her reaction, for her reluctance to talk about a certain subject often was a sign that she’d end up doing something creative with it.

[...] Yet I thought she did, and so I was driven to grope for larger understandings. [...]