“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.

While she contended with her physical difficulties and related questions, having to do with who and what Seth may or may not be, Jane continued to paint for relief. [See the opening notes for Session 928, in this chapter.] Her options had become several steps more limited once she no longer left the house. She could read and write, paint, have sessions, watch television, do a little simple housework, call or see a few close friends, and answer some of the mail. She seldom saw visitors. She no longer washed dishes or cooked at the stove. I became very uneasy at her struggling to get up on the high stool she needed to sit on at the kitchen sink. Like the sink, the stove was too high for her to reach while sitting in her chair, and, because she had to stretch across hot burners, too awkward and possibly dangerous for her to operate from the stool. She did do some cooking on a hot plate I placed on the kitchen table, where we often ate lunch and supper, but I also cautioned her to be careful while using that appliance.

“I believed in the soul’s survival first of all, and inspired the ‘creative self to step out as freely as possible even while in my heart I [also] believed in the existence of sin and devil. I felt upon my heart the heavy unkind mark of Cain, sensing that humanity carries (unfairly) the almost indelible strain—the tragic flaw—[of] being tinged by sin and ancient iniquities. Thusly I reasoned: If I am flawed I must automatically distort even those experiences of the soul that seem clearest. I must unwittingly fall into error when I trust myself the most, since I share that sinful propensity. Yet despite those feelings did I (did we) unswervingly set forward.”

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

It seemed that he could step from any one such existence to the other as you might walk from one room to the other, and he knew that at other levels of the psyche this was indeed possible—and, of course, at other levels of the psyche those psychological doors are open.

One can also say that the Seth books are a step farther removed than Jane’s are from the immediacy of life as we conceive of it. Even with the elimination of the Seth element from them, Jane’s own books would still represent a remarkable overall achievement, and had she never given expression to the Seth material I’m sure she would have developed her abilities in ways quite unknown to us now. Within her basic creativity lies the source of Seth as we are to understand him in our temporal reality. Her expression of Seth is an adjunct to that creativity, as he is the first to acknowledge.