“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

Jane and I thought it most interesting that within 29 days [in October] various events—the arrival of Volume 2 of Conversations, Jane’s coming through with her “attend” material and poetry, the visit of her former students, and even her contentions with Magical Approach—had helped her rejuvenate her sense of physical ease and well-being on at least three separate occasions. She wrote more notes, more poetry. We kept trying to encourage her new motions, of the kind described in Note 8, but they began to taper off.

“Some really beneficial and odd developments are taking place in my physical condition,” Jane wrote, “generally starting last Saturday night (October 31) when the kids visited from NYC—students I haven’t seen in nearly two years. During their visit I noticed that my right leg, propped up on the coffee table, would suddenly fall very quickly and unexpectedly to the floor. Then they left. When company had gone I talked to Rob and nodded and dozed—then again my leg suddenly dropped and entire body turned independently of my will or intent to the left. This happened several times. Then in a moment of dozing I suddenly found my body moving forward, half standing, with strong energy and more or less natural motion—all by itself.

9. Jane held her ESP classes for seven and a half years (from September 1967 through February 1975). Those gatherings were disrupted almost seven years ago, when we moved from our downtown apartments into the hill house, and for a number of reasons we did not resume them. Strange it may be, but Jane and I have never conducted a search for class artifacts, as our friends had just been doing, and as other former students had done before. We grew up without modern conveniences like portable tape recorders, of course, but even so our natural creative desires had always been to express ourselves graphically, in written and printed words and in drawn and painted images. They still are. In addition, Jane’s impetus is to continue driving forward; that’s her way, even though each project grows—as it must—out of the past. (I’ve shown in Dreams that many of her physical symptoms have resulted from conflicts between those spontaneous urges, and entrenched beliefs that revolve around her sinful self and tell her that such activity is wrong.)