“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.

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.

“He still needs your reassurances, and should tell you when he feels discouraged….”

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.

(“I should take a moment here to note that Seth has mentioned this attitude of Jane’s before, and that she has referred to it also. I haven’t had any such feelings, since from the very beginning of our relationship I’ve always felt certain that in Jane I’d found the ideal mate—an achievement I’ve considered most fortunate, one I’d hardly dared dream I’d ever manage to do. Looking back, our meeting and getting together seemed the most natural and inevitable things in the world; how could I improve upon those? I’ve always been intensely proud of Jane’s abilities and achievements, and glad to participate in them to whatever degree. The thing that has left me distraught, nearly brokenhearted, is to see her in such a progressively poor physical situation as the years have passed. Especially devastating is this when the material explains that this isn’t the only way things can be. No wonder I say to her that we’ve paid too high a price for our accomplishments. I want to see her able to manipulate like other people, of course, and to have her achievements also. That things haven’t worked out that way so far can’t but help have a profound effect upon my feelings, hers, and our relationship, which I’ve always taken absolutely as being as solid and enduring as the elements. It still is.”)