“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

“I plan to begin typing my poetry book final draft shortly,” she wrote in her journal on February 11. “The poetry itself doesn’t need a final draft—just the essays.”

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.

Jane doesn’t agree with my doubts. As always, she’s been letting me put this book together the way I think best—and inevitably that way has followed how we’ve been trying to understand our joint long-term situation. She innocently accepts my labors as they come out. And that trust always reflects, I’m sure, Seth’s own larger view of reality, as I just quoted him from Session 915. Our challenges echo throughout all of our probable realities simultaneously, and through all of them together the largest picture of Jane and myself is presented. In this probable reality we work with what we can pick up from that great whole. We keep trying to learn to ask better questions.

2. At times after Jane began to really show her physical symptoms, my awareness of the fact that basically she’s a mystic became submerged beneath many other more “practical” matters. Perhaps I should have stressed her nature more throughout Dreams. I never took that essential quality of hers for granted during those times, but instead accepted it so easily that I lost conscious stress upon it. She doesn’t use the word in connection with herself, yet I think that Jane’s mystical nature, which is so at odds with the realities most people create for themselves, actually offers the only real framework for understanding her physical condition, her choices, in our probable reality.

“Part of me doesn’t want to contend with this material at all,” Jane wrote for her journal, “but last night I had one of the strangest, quite frightening experiences—all the odder because there are so few real events to hang on to. Very early after we went to bed I realized I was in the middle of a nightmarish experience, one terribly vivid emotionally yet with no real story line. I only know that the following were involved: a childhood nursery tale and a toy like the cuddly cat doll I had as a child, named Susie, and thought the world of. Anyway, the point is that the story … and there I lose it; I don’t get the connections. All I know is that I awakened myself crying, my body very sore, sat on the side of the bed and made the following connections from my feelings at the time.

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.