“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.

“This applies—again, generally speaking—whether or not actual book dictation is involved. Difficulties arise, however, in book dictation on those occasions when he becomes too heavy-handed and worries about the responsibility of helping to solve the world’s problems—about his or my capacities in that regard—and when he considers the possible and various objections that any given subject might activate on the part of any given group of people. So if the area becomes too sensitive we let dictation go for a while. Sometimes I insert the particular material in your private sessions first of all, so that he becomes somewhat acclimated to it.”⁶

Through April and into May, I had problems controlling my own anger and hurt feelings toward Jane’s sinful self as I came to better understand its mechanisms of operation. Obviously. of course, my feelings reflected upon the workings of my sinful self, or upon some similar psychological quality—for how could I be so involved with my wife’s challenges, for almost 26 years, without complementing them within deep portions of my own personality? My anger, Seth told me, was just the way not to react, and even amid the welter of my emotions I had to agree. Jane had refused to listen to that self of hers in earlier years. “The idea is in no way to accuse the sinful self,” Seth said on April 28. “It is instead to understand it, its needs and motives, and to communicate the idea that it was sold a bad bill of goods in childhood—scared out of its wits, maligned…. Ruburt’s entire group of symptoms do not follow any established pattern. They are the result of applied stress, exaggerated finally by feelings of hopelessness, and by some relative feelings of isolation.” And I was so struck by his reference to Jane’s hopelessness that once more I returned to the private session for April 15. See Note 13, in which I quoted Seth’s material on her search for value fulfillment—how, without the psychic breakthrough of the sessions, “Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence.”