“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

“Lately I’ve been working with ideas of safety, saying and believing that I AM safe, secure and supported and that I DO trust my natural spontaneous motion. NOW as I write some old dumb stuff comes emotionally to mind—my mother saying that I’d destroy those I loved or some such nonsense. But it’s as if I always felt that spontaneously, left alone, I’d end up taking away people’s comfort blankets, and I felt bad about that, even while I knew that those philosophic blankets were wormy, had to go. And I do see that I’m offering something far better….

“Ruburt had considerable difficulty with church doctrine even then, and the rules of the order as actually practiced were later considered to hold their own seeds of heresy. As an old woman, Ruburt was forced to leave the order that he had initiated. He left with a few female companions who were also ostracized, and died finally of starvation. It was a time when unconventional patterns of thought, of unconventional expression, could have (fateful) consequences.

“When Ruburt left the church, the concept of the sinful self was still there, but the methods that earlier served to relieve its pressures were no longer effectively present. The concept was shifted over to the flawed self of scientific vintage. Science has no sacraments. Its only methods of dealing with such guilt involve standard psychoanalytic counseling—which itself deepens the dilemma, for counseling itself is based upon the idea that the inner self is a reservoir of savage impulses. Period.

“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.

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.

Otherwise, I thought, all too often the afflicted one is left with that great yawning “Why?” in the face of whatever drastic negative events are taking place; and those who suffer with the sufferer are as fated as the sufferer is to receive no satisfactory answers within their lifetimes, either. To search for answers within the narrow frames of reference offered by the conventional view of reality could be like trying to peer into the depths of personality through an opaque window….

(“I should take a moment here to note that Seth has mentioned this attitude of Jane’s before, and that she has referred to it also. I haven’t had any such feelings, since from the very beginning of our relationship I’ve always felt certain that in Jane I’d found the ideal mate—an achievement I’ve considered most fortunate, one I’d hardly dared dream I’d ever manage to do. Looking back, our meeting and getting together seemed the most natural and inevitable things in the world; how could I improve upon those? I’ve always been intensely proud of Jane’s abilities and achievements, and glad to participate in them to whatever degree. The thing that has left me distraught, nearly brokenhearted, is to see her in such a progressively poor physical situation as the years have passed. Especially devastating is this when the material explains that this isn’t the only way things can be. No wonder I say to her that we’ve paid too high a price for our accomplishments. I want to see her able to manipulate like other people, of course, and to have her achievements also. That things haven’t worked out that way so far can’t but help have a profound effect upon my feelings, hers, and our relationship, which I’ve always taken absolutely as being as solid and enduring as the elements. It still is.”)

“Now Ruburt had only one parent available most of the time, and he did not feel secure in that relationship—a situation chosen ahead of time, now. There is great leeway in the nature of such bondings…. With some people, they are so secure that they provide an overall, fairly permanent inner and outer framework. Ruburt’s relationship with his mother left much to be desired. The bonding did not secure him that vital sense of safety, and he felt threatened by abandonment. His bonding to the cultural beliefs of religion was very strong to make up for that initial lack. The sinful-self material represents those ideas that were a strong element in his original belief structures. The ‘troublesome’ material remained relatively inactive until his curiosity and ability led him to actively challenge those ideas while [he was] also in a situation where the natural fear of abandonment might be suggested. At certain points, the assimilation of new information is so qualifiedly different from the original belief structure that in order to assimilate it the personality is left for a time between belief systems.

“How a belief in reincarnation and immortality added support to life, so that it didn’t seem dead-ended. That I could relax now, admitting and realizing that I did have certain fears per the sinful self’s document (instead of pretending that I didn’t). Because brought into the light I really could handle them and see how they originated. Stuff on how society operated, whether it knew it or not, on a reincarnational basis, and how association was many-lives-thick, so to speak. Only these are thoughts I’m left with, connected to the experience while I’ve forgotten the events themselves, and the scenes that were extremely colorful and emotionally charged.”

I told Jane after the session that her material brings up innumerable questions—that just from our side, in physical reality, the variety of connections between the living and the “dead” has to equal the number of individuals on earth. For instance, I’d wondered, as I read her paper, how often does the newly deceased person’s meeting loved ones from other lifetimes “dilute” the love he or she had felt for the mate, say, who is left behind this time? How ironic, that the one still physical grieves for the departed loved one, while that newly dead individual is joyfully becoming aware of connections with other existences, other loves….

One can, of course, turn the whole thing around in various ways: The freshly dead person, still carrying his or her nonmaterial emotions, can feel a grief equal to that of the one left behind; their mutual sorrow can form a bond stronger, perhaps at least temporarily, than those created by either one in other lives with other people. Or the one still “alive” can turn away from the dead partner, relative, or friend in order to be psychically and physically free for new adventures. The variety of relationships between parents and children, no matter on which side the death occurs, must be vast. Jane said that perhaps we can get some answers from Seth.