“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Our friend, David Yoder [I’ll call him], is 48 years old. He’s a bachelor, and a high-school teacher. Jane and I met him in May 1960, when we moved from Sayre into an apartment house close to downtown Elmira. The house had once been a luxurious private home. Jane began the sessions there three years later; indeed, we were to stay there for 15 years. At first David lived across the hall from us on the second floor. Eventually he moved downstairs when a larger apartment right beneath ours became available: Still later, Jane and I rented the apartment he’d had on the second floor, so that we ended up with two apartments, side by side; we needed more room by then, and didn’t want to move.

David is one of the kindest people we’ve ever known. Jane initiated her ESP classes late in 1967—so each Tuesday night for the next seven and a half years, our friend put up with a vast amount of shouting and banging over his head. He knew what Jane was up to, but had only a peripheral interest in “psychic phenomena.” David never complained about the racket, though sometimes he secluded himself in a back room down there, or left the house until class was over. It seemed that we were always apologizing for bothering him.

David let Jane use his telephone to call our publisher when we couldn’t afford a phone ourselves. He gave us his magazines and newspapers—a practice he continues to this day during his school year. Sometimes we swapped furniture with him; sometimes he sold us at very reasonable cost pieces he’d replaced. He has a passion for neatness and the well-ordered life. He bought a power-driven lawn mower, and for years cut the grass without asking our landlord for any compensation.

In March 1975 Jane and I purchased the hill house just outside Elmira, and within a few weeks David acquired his own place not far from us in the valley below. We didn’t see each other as often as we used to, but one morning each week, on his way to school, David left his magazines and newspapers at our back porch door, whether or not we were up, or saw him.

During the last couple of weeks David hadn’t made his regular trips up the hill, but Jane and I were so busy that that fact nearly escaped us. Last Thursday morning, then, we were really shocked when Doris, who is also a teacher and a friend from those apartment-house years, called to tell us that David was in the hospital—that he was to undergo triple-bypass heart surgery the next day. Jane and I couldn’t believe it. We’d thought David was in excellent health. He’d taken up jogging some time ago and was now running 15 miles at a time, three days a week. As he lay in the hospital, David asked Doris why this was happening to him, when he’d tried to take care of himself, help others, and “do everything right.”

Each time someone we know gets in serious trouble, Jane and I start questioning anew our own values, and those of the society we live in, for such challenges seem to come unbidden and unwanted from way out in some far corner of each person’s reality. We also had in mind another friend who’d died of cancer last year at the age of 39.

David is recovering well from his surgery now, but cannot have visitors yet. Jane has called the hospital each day to ask about him; she’s putting together for him a unique, evocative little book of poetry and paintings. I’m running errands for David, and eventually will be taking him home from the hospital.

“Well,” Jane said as we sat for the session, “I’d almost rather feel that you were the victim of blind chance or accident, rather than that you get sick because of your own dumb ignorance or choice….” When I remarked that I tried not to worry about such things anymore, she replied that she too had better get back to book work and forget the world’s troubles: “Come on, Seth, I’m here.” But even as she felt him around, she knew that Seth wouldn’t be giving book dictation per se.)

(Pause at 10:05. Jane had delivered all of the above material for Seth with an emphatic mixture of speed, irony, and amusement.)

(10:45 P.M. “My God, your fingers must be ready to fall off!” Jane exclaimed as she quickly came out of her excellent trance state. She moved over to the couch from her rocker. “Why didn’t you ask for a break?”

“I don’t remember much of that,” Jane said, “but I’ve got the feeling that Seth meant the material to defuse some of my own thoughts lately—that there isn’t any answer for all of the pain and suffering in the world—that the whole thing is so vast that you can’t say or do anything that will be of much use to anyone….”

Which might help account, I told Jane, for her response to David’s illness, including the book she’s making for him. I also said that even though Seth hadn’t called this session dictation for Dreams, he very well could have done so: Large portions of it might at least help answer people’s questions.)