“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.