“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. [...] 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.

(I have difficulty believing it even when I write it—but eight months have passed since Jane held her last session for Dreams, the 928th, on November 12, 1980. [...] During this period Jane gave two regular nonbook sessions [on November 26, 1980, and on January 5, 1981], plus 48 private sessions, so we’ve been busy! [...] Jane delivered the introductory session on that subject on March 11 of this year, and I’ll be quoting from it in a note. [...] I also plan to excerpt several of those sessions for notes, and to quote a number of times from Jane’s personal journals for 1980 and 1981. [...]

Painting is really unalloyed fun for Jane. [...] Jane is freer. [...] 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. [...] To me, the lessening of Jane’s physical mobility has resulted in a strong compensating growth in her painting mobility. [...]

The day after that session for March 11 was held we received a jolt: Eleanor Friede, Jane’s editor at Delacorte Press, informed us that Jane’s book, Emir’s Education in the Proper Use of Magical Powers, was being remaindered—taken off the market because in the publisher’s view it wasn’t selling enough copies. [...] Perhaps our shock came about because we’d become spoiled without realizing it, but of Jane’s 14 books Emir¹⁰ is the first one to be withdrawn—and, ironically, the last one she’d had published. That status would soon change, however, when Mass Events and God of Jane reached the marketplace.

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. [...] 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. [...] 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

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. [...] 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.

[...] Instead he went into considerable detail as to how Jane could write a “psychic statement of intentions,” so that her sinful self would know exactly what she wanted out of life. [...] That same day, I congratulated her when our first published copy of God of Jane reached us; that excellent book had followed Mass Events all the way through the publishing process. I told Jane that God of Jane is her best book yet, and that I hope it does well in the marketplace.¹⁵ Yet I sadly noticed that the book’s appearance led to another intensification of her symptoms—the same reaction she’d had when we received our first copy of Mass Events 25 days ago. [...]

There was no doubt about it, though: As if they had a collective life of their own, Jane’s symptoms continued to clamp down after the publication of Mass Events and God of Jane. [...] Jane, with that exquisite stubbornness she can display, simply wouldn’t cooperate in that fashion. [...] On the evening of the 4th—yes, we “worked” on the holiday because Jane felt like having a session, and because “time” had become so precious to us—Seth came through with some very interesting new material as a result of our questioning.¹⁸

[...] It lay in the unpublished 874th session for August 22, 1979—the first one Jane held after having finished Mass Events a week earlier. I felt a distinct start of surprise when I came across this passage of Seth’s, for I’d completely forgotten it: “Jane, for example, entered the fetus when it was about three months old, and accepted this as a new life. [...] I didn’t remember Jane ever referring to that bit of information; certainly she’d never asked Seth to elaborate. [...] (That was one of the few times when Seth had called her Jane instead of Ruburt, by the way.)

That the Seth books outdo Jane’s other works has always puzzled us. [...] 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. [...]