“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.

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.

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.

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.

I took those associations to mean that no matter what her evolving focuses in her present life, Jane should be as much aware of my reactions to her situation as she is of her own—that even though I’d worked out religious questions in a previous life, still this time around I had chosen to share with her a probable reality within which her physical symptoms, bound up as they are with the subject of religion, could occur. (But at the same time, I reminded myself, her great creativity had also found its modes of expression in spite of everything.) If, as Seth said on April 15, conflicts like Jane’s often stem from the gifted individual’s unrequited search for value fulfillment—even resulting in an early death—then that premise is at least consciously understandable. I’ve suspected for quite a while that something like this is operating in Jane’s case. It’s not that she perversely refuses to get well, even with all of the help Seth and I have tried to give her—and that she has even asked for—but that the deepest portions of her being in this physical life have other goals, toward which her nonphysical self and her physical symptoms are traveling together. Without such thinking, I was coming to feel, there could be little comprehension of my wife’s long-term challenges.