“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.

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.

Through April and into May, I had problems controlling my own anger and hurt feelings toward Jane’s sinful self as I came to better understand its mechanisms of operation. Obviously. of course, my feelings reflected upon the workings of my sinful self, or upon some similar psychological quality—for how could I be so involved with my wife’s challenges, for almost 26 years, without complementing them within deep portions of my own personality? My anger, Seth told me, was just the way not to react, and even amid the welter of my emotions I had to agree. Jane had refused to listen to that self of hers in earlier years. “The idea is in no way to accuse the sinful self,” Seth said on April 28. “It is instead to understand it, its needs and motives, and to communicate the idea that it was sold a bad bill of goods in childhood—scared out of its wits, maligned…. Ruburt’s entire group of symptoms do not follow any established pattern. They are the result of applied stress, exaggerated finally by feelings of hopelessness, and by some relative feelings of isolation.” And I was so struck by his reference to Jane’s hopelessness that once more I returned to the private session for April 15. See Note 13, in which I quoted Seth’s material on her search for value fulfillment—how, without the psychic breakthrough of the sessions, “Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence.”

In the session itself, Seth barely began an answer to my question. 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. She started work on it the next day. 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. We were to discover very soon that her sinful self had put together the publication of the two books, my question of last night, and Seth’s own suggestion, to form an emotional trigger.

“In that regard, Ruburt’s creativity kept struggling for its own growth and value fulfillment. His psychic recognition or initiation represented a remarkable breakthrough, meant to give him that additional psychic room that would insure the continued expansion of the abilities of the natural self. The sinful-self concept is a personal one for each who holds it, but it is also projected outward into the entire species, of course, until the whole world seems tainted.

“Ruburt’s creativity broke through to provide our sessions and to release the psychic abilities that had earlier been nearly but not completely repressed.

“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.

15. I tell Jane that each book she does is her best—and I mean it each time, for each one is. The Seth books sell better, however, than do her “own” books: How to Develop Your ESP Power, Adventures in Consciousness, Psychic Politics, Cézanne and James, her Oversoul Seven novels, Dialogues and Emir. (See the opening notes for this 931st session, as well as Note 10, for my description of the demise of Emir.) Now Jane adds God of Jane to her list, with If We Live Again to follow in a few months.

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.

22. Although Jane has had “particular difficulty” with the theory of reincarnation, both through Seth and in her poetry she’s always kept psychic windows open through which she can view and express reincarnational ideas and emotions. Poetically, this will be obvious when If We Live Again is published late this year. (Probably in December. We expect to receive from Prentice-Hall the page proofs for the book, for our review, any day now.) In her poetry the young Jane was using ideas akin to reincarnation before she even knew the word—subject matter that was strongly disapproved of by the Catholic priests who visited Jane and her bedridden mother at home.