“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Amid her incessant questioning as to who or what Seth is—even if he is a master event!—and amid her concerns about leading others astray, Jane added to her journal four days later: “The worst explanation for Seth that I can imagine is that he is the part of me that I can’t express otherwise—making a psychological statement. Since his material is so terrific, why would this be bad? Because I’d be pretending to be better than I was—better than others? Or leading others to believe in life after death, because the material is so convincing?”

Two weeks later, on March 3, Jane and I really received a surprise through a friend who lives on the California coast: news of a Spanish-language translation of Jane’s first book, How to Develop Your ESP Power. The edition was printed in Mexico and is on sale in that country and on our West Coast. Our friend has a Mexican friend who showed him a copy of the book. Jane and I didn’t know what to think, since the American publisher of ESP Power, Frederick Fell Publishers, Inc., hadn’t advised us that a translation into Spanish had been authorized. The almost wordless quality of our surprise reminded me of our feelings of a year and a half ago, when we’d learned that the Dutch firm, Ankh-Hermes, had published an abridged edition of Seth Speaks in that language, without our permission.⁷

While she contended with her physical difficulties and related questions, having to do with who and what Seth may or may not be, Jane continued to paint for relief. [See the opening notes for Session 928, in this chapter.] Her options had become several steps more limited once she no longer left the house. She could read and write, paint, have sessions, watch television, do a little simple housework, call or see a few close friends, and answer some of the mail. She seldom saw visitors. She no longer washed dishes or cooked at the stove. I became very uneasy at her struggling to get up on the high stool she needed to sit on at the kitchen sink. Like the sink, the stove was too high for her to reach while sitting in her chair, and, because she had to stretch across hot burners, too awkward and possibly dangerous for her to operate from the stool. She did do some cooking on a hot plate I placed on the kitchen table, where we often ate lunch and supper, but I also cautioned her to be careful while using that appliance.

On the screen we saw a parade of citizens expressing shock, sadness, and outrage, frustrated by the knowledge that it had all happened before—not only in our country but around the world—and that it would happen again many times more. It became almost a cliché for people to wonder what was wrong with people: Why do those who attain prominence often attract those who want to destroy them? I think the Seth material contains some penetrating insights into such questions, but those ideas aren’t nearly well-enough known to help on a national scale. Seth didn’t comment upon the shooting, It wasn’t that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t—but that Jane herself is basically so innocent, so repelled by the violence involved in such episodes, that she often chooses not to go into the subject. I thought she might later in connection with other material, however; this had been the case when Seth discussed the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978.¹¹

Seth also discussed Jane’s persistent psychological abuse and mistreatment by her mother, Marie, over the years, and the young girl’s resultant deep fear of abandonment. Jane never lost that fear, and needed frequent reassurances that she was a worthy person. She’d seldom found that reinforcement while living with a parent who had been divorced and become bedridden by the time Jane was three years old, and who had a host of problems—challenges—of her own to meet.

Within a few days, after I’d taken certain measurements from Jane while she was sitting down, our friend Floyd Waterman [who is a contractor] helped me cut down an old-fashioned straight chair and equip it with small wheels. This one was narrower than later-model chairs, and it fit well in the bathroom and some other spots in the hill house. Jane could easily hoist herself onto it from her office chair, the couch, or the bed; she could either move on it around the house by herself, or have me push her. There was only one small problem: She couldn’t tolerate sitting on the bare wooden seat for more than a few minutes at a time. So while she slept late the next morning, I rebuilt the chair by myself and padded its seat. Then she found it very useful.

How fortunate she’d been able to dig it all out, we said. And how sad, we said, that others who needed such help might not be able to do the same…. Jane’s material from her sinful self is obviously too long and complicated to present here, but I stress that one of its main concerns is its genuine and ironic puzzlement as to why man has for so long—probably from even before he started recording his history—persisted in the creation of and reliance upon entities like the sinful self! Surely that concern is creative, I told Jane; her sinful self is really questioning why she’s maintained it within such narrow confines.

In the culture that you know, such information remains hidden from you. Your main belief systems lead you to feel that your present life is singular, unsupported by any knowledge of prior experience with existence, and fated to be cut off or dead-ended without a future. Instead, you always carry the inner knowledge of innumerable available futures (emphatically). Your emotional life at certain levels is enriched by the unconscious realization that those who love you from past or future are connected to you by special ties that add to your emotional heritage and support.

To those of us who are rooted in more conventional approaches to our probability, Jane’s course may at times seem incomprehensible—but as far as she’s concerned that only shows our lack of comprehension of her viewpoint. As a mystic she can have motivations toward exploring certain avenues of the human condition that most of us don’t have. Her view of basic reality is her view, and even I must still grope at times to understand her chosen role. To actually carry out her way, as she’s doing, is something I cannot do. Her sacrifice of physical motion in order to have greater creative motion is a “bargain” I shrink from making. Jane used to say to me: “I told myself that if I let myself do that, then I’ll do this in return,” One can say that that kind of equation hardly represents a mystical view, yet I know that in her case it does. I don’t believe those kinds of bargains are necessary in life to begin with, but what’s real for Jane can be quite different than it is for me, and for most other people. She does have her reasons.

“I can’t remember the events connected with the nightmare that gave rise to the feelings, but at the same time I was being assaulted or attacked by … a psychological force who wanted me to understand the danger of such a course. When I went back to sleep the entire thing would happen again. Once I think the title of a children’s tale appeared in the air in large block letters, the idea also being that outside of the known order provided by these stories, there were raging forces working against man’s existence. (The old idea of Pandora’s box comes to mind.)

“The church was quite real to Ruburt as a child, through the priests who came (to the house) regularly, and through direct contact with the religious (grade) school, and the support offered to the (fatherless) family. Ruburt’s very early poetry offended Father (Boyle), who burned his books on the fall of Rome, so he had more than a hypothetical feeling about such issues. Many of his fears originated long before the sessions, of course, and before he realized that there was any alternative at all between, say, conventional religious beliefs and complete disbelief in any nature of divinity.

“Ruburt had considerable difficulty with church doctrine even then, and the rules of the order as actually practiced were later considered to hold their own seeds of heresy. As an old woman, Ruburt was forced to leave the order that he had initiated. He left with a few female companions who were also ostracized, and died finally of starvation. It was a time when unconventional patterns of thought, of unconventional expression, could have (fateful) consequences.

“In that regard, Ruburt’s creativity kept struggling for its own growth and value fulfillment. His psychic recognition or initiation represented a remarkable breakthrough, meant to give him that additional psychic room that would insure the continued expansion of the abilities of the natural self. The sinful-self concept is a personal one for each who holds it, but it is also projected outward into the entire species, of course, until the whole world seems tainted.

For the first time ever since Jane began the sessions over 17 years ago, in December 1963, I got the chills when Seth delivered a passage—for when he remarked that without some such creative psychic expansion as the sessions “Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence,” I surely thought he meant that Jane could have chosen to die. I didn’t mention this to her after the session, and she seemed to have no such reaction when she read the typed session the next day. We did talk about a number of highly gifted people who had died at young ages; indeed, we’d often speculated about what further contributions such individuals could have made had they chosen to continue living physically. In ordinary terms, it’s easy to say that those early deaths were wasteful—but not, I said now, from the standpoints of those involved. Great variations in motivation, intent, and purpose must have been operating, but each person had done what he or she could do in this probable reality—then left it. Jane agreed that Seth had come through with excellent material. I told her I didn’t see how it could be any better.

Otherwise, I thought, all too often the afflicted one is left with that great yawning “Why?” in the face of whatever drastic negative events are taking place; and those who suffer with the sufferer are as fated as the sufferer is to receive no satisfactory answers within their lifetimes, either. To search for answers within the narrow frames of reference offered by the conventional view of reality could be like trying to peer into the depths of personality through an opaque window….

“Wednesday, July 15, 1981. Last night or rather this morning I had a strange strange dream experience, very vivid while happening, quite important I felt, and now I hardly remember it. The affair involved an excellent TV movie on reincarnation we saw last night. In the dream experience I think I was considering doing a book, a sequel, to the movie—but I was also seeing one or maybe two reincarnational lives of mine, seeing how a belief in reincarnation helped open a sense of the future in the present: I was learning how to visit those lives, which were still happening and for which I think I yearned—without dying in this life. There was a road and other scenes from my past I wanted to paint too; a significant green bottle; people I dearly loved, and Rob might have been involved too. Lots I’ve completely forgotten about people who loved you in particular lives always in some way being supportive; that we’re caught up in time-to-time overlays Seth has referred to in his late book dictation; that rhythmic time overlays happened as various anniversaries or significant events from various lives overlapped, bringing them momentarily closer (like comets) when entries back and forth, and interchanges, are particularly easier.

I told Jane after the session that her material brings up innumerable questions—that just from our side, in physical reality, the variety of connections between the living and the “dead” has to equal the number of individuals on earth. For instance, I’d wondered, as I read her paper, how often does the newly deceased person’s meeting loved ones from other lifetimes “dilute” the love he or she had felt for the mate, say, who is left behind this time? How ironic, that the one still physical grieves for the departed loved one, while that newly dead individual is joyfully becoming aware of connections with other existences, other loves….

22. Although Jane has had “particular difficulty” with the theory of reincarnation, both through Seth and in her poetry she’s always kept psychic windows open through which she can view and express reincarnational ideas and emotions. Poetically, this will be obvious when If We Live Again is published late this year. (Probably in December. We expect to receive from Prentice-Hall the page proofs for the book, for our review, any day now.) In her poetry the young Jane was using ideas akin to reincarnation before she even knew the word—subject matter that was strongly disapproved of by the Catholic priests who visited Jane and her bedridden mother at home.