“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane did feel considerably better by the time the page proofs for God of Jane reached us in mid-January. We corrected those over the time our new president was sworn into office on the 20th, and the 52 American hostages were simultaneously released after 444 days of captivity. We found the workings of our national consciousness to be both mightily creative and terribly frustrating in numerous ways. I thought the simple services in which our President and Vice-President were sworn into office were extremely moving: Unable to speak because of my emotion, I sat beside Jane on the couch while we watched the ceremonies on television, and had soup and crackers for lunch. At the same time, the hostages were “almost free” in Iran, aboard their plane taxiing into takeoff position at Iran’s Tehran airport. When our national anthem was sung I sat as though mesmerized, my eyes wet, hoping and praying [trite words!] for our country, for our defeated President, for his successor, and for the hostages. Then the hostages’ plane was in the air, flying toward Algiers, in North Africa.

When I asked her if she’d consider giving up the sessions for a while, to rest, to let her creative self give her answers to such questions, she said no.⁵ She had embarked upon a surge of private sessions, and wasn’t going to stop. Two days later, on February 17, Seth had some things to say that were quite revealing, both from his standpoint and from ours:

On April 12 the space shuttle Columbia was launched into orbit around the earth, and I thought that Jane was complementing that obvious exploration of outside space by exploring inner space with the only vehicle she had available—her own mind. That same day, Seth agreed that her new book idea was a good one. Somewhere in here we received from our friend in California the photocopies I’d asked him to obtain, of the frontmatter for the Spanish-language edition of ESP Power. So the book was out in Spanish, we saw—but we were so preoccupied with Jane’s symptoms and related matters that we let the photocopies lie on a shelf. During this time, we had been often rereading Seth’s information on the sinful self as he’d given it on March 11. [See Note 9 for this session.] That material had deeply touched us. The result was that on April 14, the day Columbia landed, Seth initiated a long series of sessions on both Jane’s own sinful self, and that quality in general. The very next evening Jane allowed him to come through with some extremely important material.¹³

During the first week in May, Jane received from Tam the copy-edited manuscript for If We Live Again. As she checked that book she listed several areas of her body where beneficial changes had begun to appear, as well as others that hadn’t shown any improvement. Her difficulties maneuvering in the bathroom were especially bothersome. She was both encouraged and discouraged, then—but did have more energy. I returned the poetry to our publisher on May 13.

Late in May we received from Prentice-Hall our first copy of Mass Events. We were both delighted and bemused that the book was published at last, especially when we considered that Jane had given the first session for it over three years ago [the 801st for April 18, 1977]. We felt that lifetimes had passed since then.

“Now Ruburt is undergoing some profound therapeutic changes. Probabilities at each point intersect with your time, and those probabilities are psychologically directed so that, in your terms once again, he is at an excellent intersection point, where the prognosis is excellent. Tell him I said this. And you are both responsible, for both of your lives merge in their fashions.”

Jane’s nature has even led me to speculate more than once that in most basic terms she may be visiting our probable reality from one that’s actually far more native to her nonphysical entity, or whole self. I don’t mean that as a physical creature she has magically switched temporal realities, but that she’s closely allied with that version of herself in that other reality. When I mention this to her, she nods but says little. Jane’s “mission” (a term she wouldn’t use) would be to give us not only greater insight into what our species has done within our historical context, both for better and for worse, but to signal what we can do—to open up unexpected vistas before us, to encourage us to explore those realms far more actively than we have so far.

“But you’re doing great, hon,” I told Jane after I’d read her journal entry. I was glad to reassure her, for I believed what I said. If she has hassles, I added, they’re quite understandable: Not only is she offering our world creative new ways by which to understand reality, but in her uncertainty about what she’s doing, she feels that she must prove her ideas to the world all by herself—something that few people have to do in such an all-encompassing manner. At the same time she has to protect herself, for both of us are caught in the uneasy notion that every time Jane gets too close to any sort of basic truth, she automatically threatens many of the deeply entrenched, rigid belief systems people have built up in our reality. Obviously Jane thinks her contemporaries often reject her—and sometimes I also think they do. Consciousness exploring itself once again, I said, more than a little ironically….

“In medieval times, to be excommunicated was no trivial incident, but an event harkening severance that touched both the soul and the body, and all political, religious and economic conditions by which the two were tied together.

“Ruburt became afraid that if he went too far he would discover that he had catapulted himself into a realm where both questions and answers were meaningless. To do that is one thing, but to take others with you would be, he felt, unforgivable—and in the framework of those fears, as his work became better known he became even more cautious.

“He did initiate a small religious order in the 16th century, in France, and he was in love for many years with the man he met in his dream (five evenings ago)—a cleric. The love was not consummated, but it was passionate and enduring nonetheless on both of their parts.

“Ruburt broke through both psychically and creatively—that is, the sessions almost immediately provided him with new creative inspiration and expression, and with the expansions needed psychologically that would help fulfill his promise as a writer and as a mature personality. He was still left, however, with the beliefs in the sinful self, and carried within him many deep fears that told him that self-expression itself and spontaneity were highly dangerous.

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.