“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A fourth entry had been made at Three Mile Island in November, and a fifth, with a 14-man crew, was projected for December 11. We followed the news accounts of the negotiations between the United States and Iran for the release of the hostages, and of the war between Iran and Iraq. Since Jane couldn’t leave the house by herself, let alone go holiday shopping, she had a close friend buy the Christmas presents she had in mind for me. My wife did her own wrapping, though, working at it in her writing room after warning me to stay away until she was through. [With eyes averted, I had to carry my own presents to a closet, where I deposited them until Christmas Eve.] Then late in December the page proofs for Mass Events arrived for our checking. This is the last major stage we’re concerned with before a book is printed, other than okaying routine components like frontmatter proofs—meaning the table of contents, dedications, quotations from Seth and Jane, and so forth—and the index.

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.

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.

By now it must be plain to the reader that Seth’s material on the sinful self—any sinful self, or all of them—could very well be considered the other side of his information on the magical approach to reality. I was all too aware of an uncomfortable dichotomy. Indeed, how irritating it was, I thought, that for Jane and me at least the magical self seemed to be so far removed from daily reality, while the sinful self was so close! Reaching out to the magical self could be thought of as some theoretically attainable goal—but the sinful self was right there, functioning within the most intimate areas of personal life. For how many others is the same situation true? Seth, I knew, would simply say that the magical self is just as real and close as any other self. The challenge for the individual is to know and to believe that, to clear unwanted growth from around the magical self so that it can bloom unimpeded….

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….

“Behind such ideas is the central point of Christianity, or one of them at least: that earthly man is a sinful creature. He is given to sin. In that regard his natural expression must be closely guarded. It must be directed toward officialdom, and outside of that boundary lay, particularly in the past, the very uncomfortable realm of the heretic.

I’ve noted before that Seth himself has no reservations at all about expressing reincarnational material. Listening to some of the tapes students made in Jane’s ESP class—in the early ‘70s, say—I hear Seth being allowed to spontaneously give regular students and first-time visitors often quite detailed and penetrating insights into their other lives; explaining how events and emotions from other existences can intermix with their counterparts in present lives. Jane still picks up such information from others, but now she seldom expresses it through Seth. I think her deep concern about leading others astray, related as it is to her early religious training, is the inhibiting force here. Then see Notes 9 and 19 for this session; their contents show that she hasn’t closed a certain window into the dream state, either.