“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Mass Events had been a particularly troubling book for Jane to produce; she’d experienced many long delays in giving the sessions for it. While reading those proofs Jane opened up new insights into her reactions to herself and her work. She summarized those conflicts in the note she wrote on our 26th wedding anniversary.³ I saw that same pattern of delay at work in her holding the sessions for Dreams—and to me that meant the same psychic and psychological forces were still operating. We finished correcting the proofs for Mass Events during our very quiet celebration of the year-end holidays, and early in January I mailed the book to Tam.

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.

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.

Those first days in March were mentally crowded ones for Jane. During the early morning hours of the 6th she had a very vivid and joyful reincarnational dream involving herself, and a dream in which she returned to her own past in this life. “I rarely have reincarnation-type dreams, but awakened around 2:00 A.M. with this and the following dream,” she wrote the next day. The first one gave her information about a life she’d lived as a nun in the former province of Normandy, France, in the 16th century. The second dream concerned her strong reaction to the death of her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo: “Little Daddy,” as Jane had affectionately called him, died in 1948 in the family’s hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York.

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. That same day, Seth agreed that her new book idea was a good one. Somewhere in here we received from our friend in California the photocopies I’d asked him to obtain, of the frontmatter for the Spanish-language edition of ESP Power. 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. During this time, we had been often rereading Seth’s information on the sinful self as he’d given it on March 11. [See Note 9 for this session.] That material had deeply touched us. 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

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. Her feet became more and more swollen, for instance; she could take the few steps between her chair and the couch only with much difficulty. A number of times she refused my offers—and those of others—to get her medical help. The reason I don’t write more in these notes about doctors and the medical profession is that I have nothing to write about. Jane, with that exquisite stubbornness she can display, simply wouldn’t cooperate in that fashion. We studied her own sinful-self material as she typed it. Again and again we scrutinized all of those elements that we thought were bound up in her symptoms: choice, fear of abandonment and the need for self-protection, penance, and the controversial nature of her gifts. July 1981 came. 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

Just before the session Jane reminded me that she was most interested in Seth commenting upon the reincarnation-type dream experience she’d had early this morning. This is the second time in four months that she’s had such an experience—most unusual for her—and this one even caused her to reflect upon her sinful self in a new way. After breakfast she wrote a very rough account of what she can remember.¹⁹ She thinks the experience was triggered by a television movie she watched last night. I saw only the end of the program, but it involved, Jane told me, a persons traveling from a present life into a past life. She finds some of the story’s concepts to be quite intriguing.

“Finish checking copy-edited manuscript of God of Jane this afternoon. Feel this important…. As I finish, I realize how much physical activity and energy is required for even that seemingly sedentary task, for I’ve been uncomfortable, sitting, switching my weight, body soreish, eyes not seeing properly and so forth…. But in some newish way I seemed to understand how much seemingly mental work is dependent upon physical vigor, flexibility and so forth; and then rather strongly—emotionally it came to me that I’d thought it my duty to clamp down physically, to cut down mobility in order to … have mobility as a writer; that is, to sit down, cut down on impulses, distractions, to make sure I’d ‘do my work,’ pursue my goal undeviatingly; that new [book] contracts instantly led me to that kind of behavior and that I really see that such behavior carried to its extremes would end up smothering my writing, defeating the purposes it (seemingly) meant to protect. But I did fear that impulses and body motion were … distractions to work…. Now I see how much impulses are conducive … to just typing, for God’s sake; imagine typing and seeing with ease, just thinking about what I’m thinking about, instead of trying to get my fingers on the proper keys. I feel as if I’m on to something here … feel some relaxation. If this is the case, the entire process could be changed around quite quickly, of course, toward mobility. I’m not writing here tonight about the reasons behind such behavior—many ideas—but did want to get something down now….”

“Yesterday while checking the page proofs for Mass Events I got the feeling that that book really bothered me, served as a focal point. My eye troubles started the same spring that Seth started dictating it [in 1977]; I was doing [my world-view book on William] James; and those people were picketing Prentice-Hall’s offices in New York City because of the Seth material. The fact had escaped me earlier that Mass Events represented Seth’s and my direct attack on official dictums—or so it seemed to me. Before, we sort of did it by inference.

“In fact, Seth gave us Framework 1 and 2 stuff in there, to help me. I did grab hold several times, and with the God of Jane book, the new inspiration there and the material on following impulses, made some very good improvements. [Rob’s emphasis:] But far more than Rob from the beginning, I was nervous and anxious about directly coming out with many of the ideas—which at the same time I fervently and even passionately believe in…. I may fear that if you go too far … telling it like it is … that the establishment will just cut off your platform … or that people will stop buying the books … something like … biting the hand that feeds you. You can only go so far. Yet I’ve always known that these ideas conflicted with official ones. It’s just that [earlier our] ‘attack’ was less direct.

“But you’re doing great, hon,” I told Jane after I’d read her journal entry. I was glad to reassure her, for I believed what I said. If she has hassles, I added, they’re quite understandable: Not only is she offering our world creative new ways by which to understand reality, but in her uncertainty about what she’s doing, she feels that she must prove her ideas to the world all by herself—something that few people have to do in such an all-encompassing manner. At the same time she has to protect herself, for both of us are caught in the uneasy notion that every time Jane gets too close to any sort of basic truth, she automatically threatens many of the deeply entrenched, rigid belief systems people have built up in our reality. Obviously Jane thinks her contemporaries often reject her—and sometimes I also think they do. Consciousness exploring itself once again, I said, more than a little ironically….

4. Jane wrote the material I quoted in Note 3 some six weeks ago. In this spontaneous essay for her new journal she attempted to move beyond that thinking not only by searching through her own past, but by incorporating some of Seth’s latest ideas. Here are excerpts:

“Seth as a ‘master event.’ As the Mona Lisa is ‘more real’ than, say, a normal object or the [materials] that compose it, so is all good or great art more than its own physical manifestation. Consider art as a natural phenomenon constructed by the psyche, a transspecies of perception and consciousness that changes, enlarges and expands life’s experiences and casts them in a different light, offering new opportunities for creating action and new solutions to problems by inserting new, original data.

“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.

“It is one thing to say that the dilemma is unfortunate, but it is also true to say that the dilemma existed because of a breakthrough that gave him what amounted to a new life at the time….”

(Seven and a half years ago, Seth had referred to a version of myself living in first-century Rome: “So Joseph ‘was’ Nebene, a scholarly man, not adventurous, obsessed with copying ancient truths, and afraid that creativity was error; authoritative and demanding. He feared sexual encounter, and he taught rich Roman children.” In Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, see Session 721 for November 25, 1974. One might say that I’m still obsessed with truths—as I take down the Seth material, for example—only now I call them timeless rather than ancient or new.)

And for me, at least, the reincarnational dimensions behind our present joint situation were heightened by a third association. 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. You waited longer.” I didn’t remember Jane ever referring to that bit of information; certainly she’d never asked Seth to elaborate. I hadn’t either. (That was one of the few times when Seth had called her Jane instead of Ruburt, by the way.)

“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.

“His idea of a project on the magical approach now is excellent, for it suggests a new concentration or focus.”

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.