“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I’d never seen Jane hesitate for so many months over beginning a new project, as she had with Magical Approach. Usually she just plunged right into her latest creative inspiration, and that she hadn’t done so this time was to me a clear sign of her long-range, general physical-emotional state. I continued to reassure her [as Seth did also] after she’d finished Chapter 10, for I was deeply frustrated and concerned for her. There wasn’t anything else I could offer that she would affirm. As the weeks passed she denied more than once that she was depressed. Watching my wife over the years, I’d long ago come to feel that I was observing someone who was following a chosen course with incredible ability and determination. Nor is it contradictory of me even now to note that Jane’s path is quite in accord with her basically innocent, mystical nature—for her acceptance of her nature makes possible her explorations of it in her own unique ways. When she does mourn her impaired state, it’s still never with that tired old question directed at a supposedly unjust and uncaring nature: “Why me?” She just keeps trying to grapple with her challenges.

Following her latest self-renewal of faith, Jane started to notice some physical improvements. One very unusual way these showed themselves began on the evening of October 31, when four younger people who had been members of ESP class visited us from New York City.⁸ They’d been scouting the Elmira area for other ex-students, to see if any of them had old class tapes of Jane speaking for Seth and/or singing in Sumari; they had had some success in their searches, but we didn’t play any of the tapes that night.⁹

Through all of our challenges, we were aware of at least some of the incredible variety of positive and negative world events in the news—the bombings and the peace talks, the sports contests and the religious controversies, the national strikes and the latest developments in the arts. Amid the economic difficulties in our own country, and after a number of often very expensive delays, the second flight of our shuttle spacecraft, Columbia, came due on November 4. Of primary importance was to be the testing in space of the 50-foot-long remote-control robot arm, which had been designed to place satellites in orbit and retrieve them for service and repair. Only seconds before lift-off, however, computers shut down Columbia’s flight because of a drop in pressure in oxygen tanks. Then clogged oil filters were discovered. The launch was rescheduled for November 12.

8. Our four visitors had become our dear friends long ago. I was sure that, by arriving just when they did, they contributed much to Jane’s latest improvements. They offered enthusiasm and faith and reinforcement to both of us, and renewed in us a fine nostalgia for old, seemingly more innocent times—even though all of us knew that that was illusory: Basically, those class days, those class years, couldn’t have been any more innocent than any other times; it was just that hindsight helped!