“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Even though she wasn’t walking, Jane continued taking her steps between her office chair and the living-room couch, from which she was giving most of her sessions those days. As December came she stopped getting into the shower because of the trouble she had maneuvering in the bathroom, so I began helping her take sponge baths instead. Her physical condition was obviously intimately related to her creative condition. Even the simple act of writing was becoming increasingly difficult for her.¹ On December 4 I sent back to our publisher the corrected copy-edited manuscript for God of Jane. And late that month, and for the very first time, Jane allowed me to push her in her chair in front of company—a Friday-night group of friends, one reminiscent of the free, exuberant gatherings we used to have every weekend in our downtown apartments. Not that all of our friends hadn’t known of Jane’s physical symptoms for some time, but that Jane, with her innocence and determination—and yes, her mystical view of temporal reality²—had for the most part refused to put herself on display, as she termed it: She felt that she should offer something better to herself and to others, even with all of the intensely creative work she’d done for herself and for others over the last 17 years.

As if manufacturing tiny, intensely personal counterparts to those large events, Jane and I finished checking the proofs for God of Jane; she resumed work on her essays, and some new poetry, for If We Live Again; I painted, answered a lot of mail, and helped her continue our private sessions. And those acts of ours, I thought, while so small compared to the national dramas being enacted, actually were our contribution to those great plays. Even the fact that by January 26 my wife hadn’t walked with her typing table for ten weeks played its part. I felt that connection, but couldn’t describe very well what I meant. On that same day back went God of Jane to the publisher, for the last time.

Jane’s overall symptoms worsened, and I sensed connections between her situation and the arrival of Mass Events. As of June 2 she hadn’t walked for six and a half months, even with the aid of her typing table. That very day a crisis appeared: In the bathroom, and for the first time in all the years of her physical troubles, she couldn’t manipulate well enough on her feet to get back into her wheeled office chair over by the sink. I carried her—and that act was a deep blow to the stubborn self-reliance that is so characteristic of each one of us. I was dismayed, as Jane was. As if to atone for my own frustration at a deteriorating situation, when typing that evening’s session [the next day] I inserted a statement of my love for my wife. I was to learn that that simple reinforcement greatly affected her, as it had me when I wrote it.¹⁴

5. For that matter, I’ve often told my wife that it would be all right with me if she decided to give up the sessions entirely—for good—period. Anything to help, I always thought at such times. More than once I’ve asked her if she keeps the sessions going just for me. Jane comes first with me—not the sessions, or anything else she might do. Her being is what I want to spend the rest of my life with. Once again I recalled Seth’s statement in Chapter 5 of Dreams, in Volume 1. See Session 899 for February 6, 1980: “But the purpose of your life, and each life, is in its being (intently). That being may include certain actions, but the acts themselves are only important in that they spring out of the essence of your life, which simply by being is bound to fulfill its purposes.”

“His poetry acted in some regards as a stimulator. That breakthrough, you might say, with perhaps some exaggeration, was a lifesaver, for without some such expansion Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence. It is not possible to say in words what one person or another looks for in life, or what unique features best promote his or her growth and development. Even two plants of the same kind sometimes require completely different treatments. The sessions, then, opened the door to a particular kind of value fulfillment that was natural to Ruburt’s being. Now to some extent it was that poor, unhappy sinful self, a psychological structure formed by beliefs and feelings, that was also seeking its own redemption, since even it had outgrown the framework that so defined it.