“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane did feel considerably better by the time the page proofs for God of Jane reached us in mid-January. We corrected those over the time our new president was sworn into office on the 20th, and the 52 American hostages were simultaneously released after 444 days of captivity. We found the workings of our national consciousness to be both mightily creative and terribly frustrating in numerous ways. I thought the simple services in which our President and Vice-President were sworn into office were extremely moving: Unable to speak because of my emotion, I sat beside Jane on the couch while we watched the ceremonies on television, and had soup and crackers for lunch. At the same time, the hostages were “almost free” in Iran, aboard their plane taxiing into takeoff position at Iran’s Tehran airport. When our national anthem was sung I sat as though mesmerized, my eyes wet, hoping and praying [trite words!] for our country, for our defeated President, for his successor, and for the hostages. Then the hostages’ plane was in the air, flying toward Algiers, in North Africa.

“Well,” I said, groping a bit, “what we’re seeing is the best the country can offer at this time. It’s always this way—you know, the collective expression of our national consciousness—uh, cooperating in whatever way with Iran’s, and with that of every other country on earth….”

As if manufacturing tiny, intensely personal counterparts to those large events, Jane and I finished checking the proofs for God of Jane; she resumed work on her essays, and some new poetry, for If We Live Again; I painted, answered a lot of mail, and helped her continue our private sessions. And those acts of ours, I thought, while so small compared to the national dramas being enacted, actually were our contribution to those great plays. Even the fact that by January 26 my wife hadn’t walked with her typing table for ten weeks played its part. I felt that connection, but couldn’t describe very well what I meant. On that same day back went God of Jane to the publisher, for the last time.

Jane, again, dreamed often of walking, running, dancing, moving normally. To me those dreams were messages of encouragement not only from her own psyche, but from that certain other version of herself that I referred to in Note 2 for this session. In that reality [as well as in some others], she did have all of her motive powers. In this one, she was physically uncomfortable much of the time. Early in February she wrote an essay on Seth as a “master event.”⁴ That piece was inspired by her material in an old journal; Jane elaborated upon it in an effort to fit events from our own lives into our national consciousness. If Seth truly is a master event, I told her, the implications of her creative work are great: What she has to offer does count, it helps others in a significant way….

On Monday, March 30, 1981, Jane happily finished typing her manuscript for If We Live Again—and in our nation’s capital that same afternoon our President was wounded in an assassination attempt. We watched television replays of the shooting over and over again during the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, as for the second time within a generation the overall consciousness of the United States struggled, through our leaders, to meet one of the great challenges to our democratic way of life.

On the screen we saw a parade of citizens expressing shock, sadness, and outrage, frustrated by the knowledge that it had all happened before—not only in our country but around the world—and that it would happen again many times more. It became almost a cliché for people to wonder what was wrong with people: Why do those who attain prominence often attract those who want to destroy them? I think the Seth material contains some penetrating insights into such questions, but those ideas aren’t nearly well-enough known to help on a national scale. Seth didn’t comment upon the shooting, It wasn’t that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t—but that Jane herself is basically so innocent, so repelled by the violence involved in such episodes, that she often chooses not to go into the subject. I thought she might later in connection with other material, however; this had been the case when Seth discussed the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana, in November 1978.¹¹