“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.

Once again, we had no guidelines on how to use Jane’s material, except to trust that we’d do the best we could. Achieving results could take a while. “If you do that book on the magical approach,” I asked her, “are you going to use all this stuff on the sinful self, or what?” Jane didn’t know. She did know that she’d been considering an outline for a book on the magical approach. In the meantime, the plan that spontaneously came to me on that last day of her own effort, on June 22, was to present a page or two of her sinful-self material here, then repeat it, along with other excerpts, in the Introduction I’ve already mentioned that I must write for Dreams.¹⁷

“To [achieve] that, I have to drop those old feelings of responsibility as a primary focus, because they strain the Seth-book framework, particularly when I demand that in each book Seth answer all questions and so forth.

(“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.