“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.

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.

Jane, again, dreamed often of walking, running, dancing, moving normally. To me those dreams were messages of encouragement not only from her own psyche, but from that certain other version of herself that I referred to in Note 2 for this session. In that reality [as well as in some others], she did have all of her motive powers. In this one, she was physically uncomfortable much of the time. Early in February she wrote an essay on Seth as a “master event.”⁴ That piece was inspired by her material in an old journal; Jane elaborated upon it in an effort to fit events from our own lives into our national consciousness. If Seth truly is a master event, I told her, the implications of her creative work are great: What she has to offer does count, it helps others in a significant way….

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:

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.

Three days later, after a final checking, I mailed Jane’s book of poetry to Tam Mossman at Prentice-Hall. Since she wouldn’t be working with that project for some little time now, Jane’s restless creative mind began to play with other ideas. Even though she often didn’t feel well, a portion of her creativity led her to have dreams of walking and dancing, of being completely healed physically. She wrote more poetry. She painted. And once again she considered a book featuring Seth’s sessions on the magical approach to reality, the series he’d given through August and September of last year.¹²

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.

And yet, Seth told us, in spite of everything Jane’s sinful self could begin to change once it was reached. We had reached it to some degree, and more than once, but the emotional upsets involved had left Jane feeling worse during this time. Her sinful self, according to Seth, no longer identifies with the Church. That self itself has become frightened, in conflict within itself over its early training and Jane’s great creativity, which it regards as wrong: The creative self is guilty. Jane had panic attacks while sleeping.

How fortunate she’d been able to dig it all out, we said. And how sad, we said, that others who needed such help might not be able to do the same…. Jane’s material from her sinful self is obviously too long and complicated to present here, but I stress that one of its main concerns is its genuine and ironic puzzlement as to why man has for so long—probably from even before he started recording his history—persisted in the creation of and reliance upon entities like the sinful self! Surely that concern is creative, I told Jane; her sinful self is really questioning why she’s maintained it within such narrow confines.

“I resent the designation unjustly given me, for if I have believed in the phenomenon of sin and sought—apparently too rigidly—to avoid it, my intentions and interests always were not the avoidance of sin so much as the pursuit of eternal truths; the alliance with universal goals, the unity in spirit at least of self, whole self, and universal mind. Those goals ignite your creative powers and have (and still do) propelled you to explore all categories of existence possible, seeking to express those divine mysteries that lie within and behind each existence—yours, and mine as well.

“I believed in the soul’s survival first of all, and inspired the ‘creative self to step out as freely as possible even while in my heart I [also] believed in the existence of sin and devil. I felt upon my heart the heavy unkind mark of Cain, sensing that humanity carries (unfairly) the almost indelible strain—the tragic flaw—[of] being tinged by sin and ancient iniquities. Thusly I reasoned: If I am flawed I must automatically distort even those experiences of the soul that seem clearest. I must unwittingly fall into error when I trust myself the most, since I share that sinful propensity. Yet despite those feelings did I (did we) unswervingly set forward.”

To those of us who are rooted in more conventional approaches to our probability, Jane’s course may at times seem incomprehensible—but as far as she’s concerned that only shows our lack of comprehension of her viewpoint. As a mystic she can have motivations toward exploring certain avenues of the human condition that most of us don’t have. Her view of basic reality is her view, and even I must still grope at times to understand her chosen role. To actually carry out her way, as she’s doing, is something I cannot do. Her sacrifice of physical motion in order to have greater creative motion is a “bargain” I shrink from making. Jane used to say to me: “I told myself that if I let myself do that, then I’ll do this in return,” One can say that that kind of equation hardly represents a mystical view, yet I know that in her case it does. I don’t believe those kinds of bargains are necessary in life to begin with, but what’s real for Jane can be quite different than it is for me, and for most other people. She does have her reasons.

“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….

“To confine such creativity to solve life’s problems primarily, or to direct it primarily in that fashion, limits it and holds it in an improper focus; shackles it.

“We have to go beyond that—back to stressing the creative larger-than-life aspects. Otherwise all we have is a better problem-solving framework…. I’ve rejected all that kind of hash projected onto Seth’s books by others or myself—the assumptions that Seth must prove himself as a problem-solver—or the importance of functionalism over art. The larger view is that art, by being itself, is bigger than life while springing from it; that Seth’s and my books go beyond that simply by being themselves. They automatically put people in a different, vaster psychological space, another frame of reference, in which a good number of problems vanish or simply do not apply….

“Again as with master events, we’re dealing with a different framework of action entirely, where the Mona Lisa is ‘more real’ than the physical properties that compose it. This is not to deny the validity of its [materials]. But to discuss Seth and his ideas primarily from the true-or-false framework is the same thing as considering the Mona Lisa only from the validity of the physical properties of its paint and panel: very very limiting…. I don’t have to ‘live up’ to anything. I don’t have to ‘make the material work,’ or prove through my actions that it does, because it proves itself in the way that creativity does, by being beyond levels of true-false references. Otherwise I’m at cross-purposes with myself.”

“Many people were dependent upon the church for their well-being, and in reincarnational terms many millions of people alive today were familiar then with such conditions. The nunneries and monasteries were long-term social and religious institutions, some extremely rigorous, while others were religiously oriented in name only. But there is a long history of the conflicts between creative thought, heresy, excommunication—or worse, death. All of those factors were involved in one way or another in the fabric of Ruburt’s nightmare material.

“Ruburt’s creative nature early began to perceive at least that man’s existence contained other realities that were deeper. Some of this is difficult to separate. To leave the church, say, meant to carry still some of the old beliefs, but without the bandaids that earlier offered some protection.

“He began to search actually from childhood in a natural fashion toward some larger framework that would offer an explanation for reality, that bore at least some resemblance to the natural vision of his best poetry. I have said before that many creative people, highly gifted, have died young in one way or the other because their great gifts of creativity could find no clear room in which to grow. They became strangled by the beliefs of the cultural times.

“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.

“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.

“In that regard, you have what amounts to a creative dilemma.

For the first time ever since Jane began the sessions over 17 years ago, in December 1963, I got the chills when Seth delivered a passage—for when he remarked that without some such creative psychic expansion as the sessions “Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence,” I surely thought he meant that Jane could have chosen to die. I didn’t mention this to her after the session, and she seemed to have no such reaction when she read the typed session the next day. We did talk about a number of highly gifted people who had died at young ages; indeed, we’d often speculated about what further contributions such individuals could have made had they chosen to continue living physically. In ordinary terms, it’s easy to say that those early deaths were wasteful—but not, I said now, from the standpoints of those involved. Great variations in motivation, intent, and purpose must have been operating, but each person had done what he or she could do in this probable reality—then left it. Jane agreed that Seth had come through with excellent material. I told her I didn’t see how it could be any better.

(Seven and a half years ago, Seth had referred to a version of myself living in first-century Rome: “So Joseph ‘was’ Nebene, a scholarly man, not adventurous, obsessed with copying ancient truths, and afraid that creativity was error; authoritative and demanding. He feared sexual encounter, and he taught rich Roman children.” In Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, see Session 721 for November 25, 1974. One might say that I’m still obsessed with truths—as I take down the Seth material, for example—only now I call them timeless rather than ancient or new.)

I took those associations to mean that no matter what her evolving focuses in her present life, Jane should be as much aware of my reactions to her situation as she is of her own—that even though I’d worked out religious questions in a previous life, still this time around I had chosen to share with her a probable reality within which her physical symptoms, bound up as they are with the subject of religion, could occur. (But at the same time, I reminded myself, her great creativity had also found its modes of expression in spite of everything.) If, as Seth said on April 15, conflicts like Jane’s often stem from the gifted individual’s unrequited search for value fulfillment—even resulting in an early death—then that premise is at least consciously understandable. I’ve suspected for quite a while that something like this is operating in Jane’s case. It’s not that she perversely refuses to get well, even with all of the help Seth and I have tried to give her—and that she has even asked for—but that the deepest portions of her being in this physical life have other goals, toward which her nonphysical self and her physical symptoms are traveling together. Without such thinking, I was coming to feel, there could be little comprehension of my wife’s long-term challenges.

That the Seth books outdo Jane’s other works has always puzzled us. Each one of her books, whether produced by herself or with Seth, is an equally valid and intimate expression of her basic creativity. Seth doesn’t come from some separate, more exalted portion of Jane’s psyche that’s off limits to her when she’s writing her own books. As he’s often said himself, he isn’t omnipotent: Like Jane, he shrinks from being a guru—and I stress that Seth doesn’t hold that attitude just because Jane does. Neither seeks to dominate the other; each tries to help the other.

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.