“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Following Session 928, Jane, even with Seth’s obvious attempts to help, and with her obvious willingness to obtain and accept that help, remained housebound, as I came to think of her condition. She gave up walking with the aid of her typing table on November 16, according to my notes for the private session of that date.

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.

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.

Jane, again, dreamed often of walking, running, dancing, moving normally. To me those dreams were messages of encouragement not only from her own psyche, but from that certain other version of herself that I referred to in Note 2 for this session. In that reality [as well as in some others], she did have all of her motive powers. In this one, she was physically uncomfortable much of the time. Early in February she wrote an essay on Seth as a “master event.”⁴ That piece was inspired by her material in an old journal; Jane elaborated upon it in an effort to fit events from our own lives into our national consciousness. If Seth truly is a master event, I told her, the implications of her creative work are great: What she has to offer does count, it helps others in a significant way….

Three days later, after a final checking, I mailed Jane’s book of poetry to Tam Mossman at Prentice-Hall. Since she wouldn’t be working with that project for some little time now, Jane’s restless creative mind began to play with other ideas. Even though she often didn’t feel well, a portion of her creativity led her to have dreams of walking and dancing, of being completely healed physically. She wrote more poetry. She painted. And once again she considered a book featuring Seth’s sessions on the magical approach to reality, the series he’d given through August and September of last year.¹²

Jane’s overall symptoms worsened, and I sensed connections between her situation and the arrival of Mass Events. As of June 2 she hadn’t walked for six and a half months, even with the aid of her typing table. That very day a crisis appeared: In the bathroom, and for the first time in all the years of her physical troubles, she couldn’t manipulate well enough on her feet to get back into her wheeled office chair over by the sink. I carried her—and that act was a deep blow to the stubborn self-reliance that is so characteristic of each one of us. I was dismayed, as Jane was. As if to atone for my own frustration at a deteriorating situation, when typing that evening’s session [the next day] I inserted a statement of my love for my wife. I was to learn that that simple reinforcement greatly affected her, as it had me when I wrote it.¹⁴

On succeeding days Jane made several attempts to get on her feet so that she could try to walk by leaning upon her typing table and pushing it before her, but each time she couldn’t quite make it. Her feet began to swell. She worked on a long poem about Stonehenge, the great megalithic monument of standing stones in southern England. She did little typing because her arms were so sore, but she did do some painting. We held a session on the evening of June 15, and here’s the key paragraph from my opening notes for it:

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.