“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I think most people would agree that Jane’s singing in Sumari is extraordinarily original, and that she’s an excellent natural dramatist. It’s easy to miss, or skip over, the drama in her lifework because it’s so pervasive in all of her creative endeavors. She was fully aware that that quality became much more obvious in her class singing and sessions, but she didn’t have to consciously evoke it—the drama was just there. In its own form each time, it still underlies our sessions, and her poetry, writing, and painting.

I’m afraid that I did most of the talking in our “discussion,” but once again we tried to view our lives in some sort of joint mental and physical perspective. We didn’t fight, or even argue. We never do, yet I said things that later I wished I hadn’t. Such regrets are inevitable, I suppose, but if I can tell my wife about the storms of consciousness that I think are so active in the Middle East, for example, then certainly I feel like discussing my feelings about our own challenges. Both of us are as concerned as ever about her situation. Jane’s feelings of panic, which she had today, and which I tried to help her through, generate their counterparts within me—no doubt about it. At times I couldn’t believe myself as I talked tonight, even while I was driven once again to think that on the deepest levels Jane’s mystical way is bringing her just what she wants. (In Chapter 9, see Note 13 for Session 931.)

“What I think about illness,” I said, “is that as a people we know so little about it consciously that we’re still literally in the dark ages in that respect. I’ve felt that way for a long time now—that our understanding of what human beings really are is minute at best. Seth offers the greatest insights I’ve ever heard, and I’m more grateful for those than I can say. I think it’s very dangerous to take too hard a position on anything we think we’ve learned as a species, for I can’t imagine that in future millennia we’ll ever cling to very much of it. In the meantime we’re groping around in the dark. To ask any one person to figure it all out now, and to prove it to the world and cure oneself at the same time, may just be asking too much. Learning about our abilities is a social and cultural affair, and you—anyone—need help. Lots of it. Only where do you get the help while trying to learn a few things?

Jane’s main puzzlement, however, is that even with Seth’s and her own sinful-self material her physical symptoms persist to such a degree, in spite of an occasional lessening. Evidently, she said, both of us are still consciously unsure of what our challenges and fears are on certain levels. Obviously, I’m as deeply involved in her symptoms as she is. We talked about the many delays involved in our producing Mass Events and Dreams. She’s “felt good” about finishing Chapter 11 of Dreams a week ago, but has done little on Magical Approach recently, except to reread her rough work for the beginning of that book. (She began to slack off from Magical Approach early last October—two months ago—after working well on the first three chapters.) Tonight, I even speculated, admitted my fear, that in a way she’s embarked upon a long-range campaign to at least drastically reduce, if not eliminate, her communication with the world, for one sacrifice follows another in an order that can hardly be accidental, Jane revealed that she’d had similar thoughts.

(10:28. Sitting very quietly on the couch, Jane took another long pause. Her eyes were closed. Then she began to gently snore: She was asleep, of course. After my first surprise I debated over whether to call her. Finally, as I began to put away my notebook, she came back to her Seth consciousness with a start:)

As I did for the opening notes for the session, I’m summarizing the closing notes. Jane remembered sleeping, but nothing that might have taken place during that time. We understood how she could drift into sleep from her trance state—if she was tired, say, or deeply dissociated—but in spite of my questions she had no idea of why she “woke up” in trance instead of in her usual awake state of consciousness. She’d even resumed speaking for Seth. She dozed again while I put away my notebook and fed the cats. I helped her get into her chair from the couch.

“It is the adult’s version of childhood knowledge, the human version of the animals’ knowledge, the conscious version of ‘unconscious’ comprehension. I told you that Frameworks 1 and 2 were actually united. They seemed to be so disunited that it is almost impossible to discuss them using any other terms. To understand that much alone, to comprehend the simple idea of Framework 2’s indisputable existence is strongly important, however.”

13. In Jane’s Adventures in Consciousness, see Chapter 7 for her thorough discussion of how she began to speak and sing in her trance language, Sumari, in November 1971.

Occasionally Jane will record a Sumari song when I’m out of the house; I may hear her play it later, but I don’t “bug” her about sharing it with me. With the increase in her symptoms her songs have become more subdued, more poignant. Although she seldom translates them into English, I know their subject matter. As Seth does, they represent one portion of her psyche offering reassurances to another more conscious portion, in our terms; they deal with her questioning of the reality she’s creating in the finest personal detail—her wanting to know why she’s made her choices, her determination to press ahead, her embracing of our beloved earth and our universe. Sometimes her singing carries from her writing room at the back of the house, through the kitchen, around the corner and down the hall into my studio. And sometimes I hear her voice break in mid-song. She is overwhelmed with her yearning. She stops singing.