“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Painting is really unalloyed fun for Jane. Not that she doesn’t have her failures, but her work has greatly improved since we met in 1954, and in ways that I hadn’t foreseen for her. Indeed, I now think that my wife is a better painter in her way than I am in mine. This doesn’t mean that I’m knocking my own abilities in any way. Jane is freer. She works in oils, acrylics, and watercolors. When painting she knows a release from time, care, and responsibility that she doesn’t experience otherwise—and surely that pleasure emphasizes qualities of living that Seth has always stressed. Her painting is her unhampered creative translation of the Seth material into pigments instead of words. Because of her defective vision Jane sees perspective differently than I do, yet achieves her own kind of depth with her “instinctive” designs and color choices. Her art contains a charming, innocent, mystical freedom that I envy. She’s produced many more paintings than I have in my own more conventional, more plodding way [although now I’m working faster than I used to]. I think that any assessment of her writing and psychic abilities will have to include a close study of her painting. To me, the lessening of Jane’s physical mobility has resulted in a strong compensating growth in her painting mobility. I also think her painting reflects her free physical motion in her dreams. Hardly accidental, any of that. I’ve seen her turn almost automatically to the relief that only painting can give her.

As he progressed with the series, Seth delved into Jane’s sinful self from a number of viewpoints: its birth and growth during her intense relationship with the Roman Catholic Church throughout her early years; the development of her very stubborn core beliefs; her creative dilemmas after she left the church in her late teens; the conflicts she began to experience after our marriage, involving on the one hand her sinful self and the religion she thought she’d left behind, and on the other hand science, art, writing, and the unconventional direction she discovered her natural, mystical abilities were taking via the Seth material; her growing fears of leading others astray; and the very real necessity for her—and for each individual—to achieve value fulfillment.

I could add much material from Jane’s personal past to supplement just the session excerpts given here; perhaps the two of us can explore those fascinating connections in a later work. Right now I’ll make just one point: The priest, burning Jane’s books in the backyard of the house she lived in, taught the growing girl in most specific terms that she had to protect her natural abilities and her inquiring mind even from the very institution—the Roman Catholic Church—that she had so strongly identified with.

“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.

“Ruburt’s creativity broke through to provide our sessions and to release the psychic abilities that had earlier been nearly but not completely repressed.

“Each person seeks value fulfillment, and that means that they choose various lives in such a fashion that all of their abilities and capacities can be best developed, and in such a way that their world is also enriched. Some people will choose ‘defective’ bodies purposely in order to focus more intensely in other areas. They want a different kind of focus…. Such a choice demands an intensification. It is made on the part of the individual and on the parts of the parents as well….”

(“I should take a moment here to note that Seth has mentioned this attitude of Jane’s before, and that she has referred to it also. I haven’t had any such feelings, since from the very beginning of our relationship I’ve always felt certain that in Jane I’d found the ideal mate—an achievement I’ve considered most fortunate, one I’d hardly dared dream I’d ever manage to do. Looking back, our meeting and getting together seemed the most natural and inevitable things in the world; how could I improve upon those? I’ve always been intensely proud of Jane’s abilities and achievements, and glad to participate in them to whatever degree. The thing that has left me distraught, nearly brokenhearted, is to see her in such a progressively poor physical situation as the years have passed. Especially devastating is this when the material explains that this isn’t the only way things can be. No wonder I say to her that we’ve paid too high a price for our accomplishments. I want to see her able to manipulate like other people, of course, and to have her achievements also. That things haven’t worked out that way so far can’t but help have a profound effect upon my feelings, hers, and our relationship, which I’ve always taken absolutely as being as solid and enduring as the elements. It still is.”)

One can also say that the Seth books are a step farther removed than Jane’s are from the immediacy of life as we conceive of it. Even with the elimination of the Seth element from them, Jane’s own books would still represent a remarkable overall achievement, and had she never given expression to the Seth material I’m sure she would have developed her abilities in ways quite unknown to us now. Within her basic creativity lies the source of Seth as we are to understand him in our temporal reality. Her expression of Seth is an adjunct to that creativity, as he is the first to acknowledge.

“Now Ruburt had only one parent available most of the time, and he did not feel secure in that relationship—a situation chosen ahead of time, now. There is great leeway in the nature of such bondings…. With some people, they are so secure that they provide an overall, fairly permanent inner and outer framework. Ruburt’s relationship with his mother left much to be desired. The bonding did not secure him that vital sense of safety, and he felt threatened by abandonment. His bonding to the cultural beliefs of religion was very strong to make up for that initial lack. The sinful-self material represents those ideas that were a strong element in his original belief structures. The ‘troublesome’ material remained relatively inactive until his curiosity and ability led him to actively challenge those ideas while [he was] also in a situation where the natural fear of abandonment might be suggested. At certain points, the assimilation of new information is so qualifiedly different from the original belief structure that in order to assimilate it the personality is left for a time between belief systems.