“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane’s “early spontaneous Saratoga images,” as she called them, her re-creation of her own past, had continued the next day. I found her visions particularly poignant, because in them she had seen herself as having the full and unconscious freedom of physical motion that the very young so take for granted. I wondered whether a part of her might be viewing her childhood in order to remind her of that mobile heritage, to help her regenerate it in the present.⁵ “see myself jumproping [again]… but the places themselves seem more significant to me [today] rather than people,” she wrote. “they are fairly extensive, in color and i look out from them at the view thus going inside them to a degree; must cover the… time period when I was about three…. vague ideas that when I was around five an older man died in the neighboring house where I’d played on the porch and that someone took me to see the body—my first such experience…. Well, now I’ll read a magical approach session, rob and I together read recent session this a.m….” And she had more strong dreams that evening.

I told her I think that on those levels she really doesn’t want to hold the sessions anymore, that we’re surrounded by clues to that effect, that such a strong part of her is now so against her psychic work, so afraid of its implications—of being swept away, of going counter to her early religious imprinting—that her fear has put her in an impossible position physically. Since she’s becoming more and more helpless, I said, we can hardly say we’re solving our challenges in ordinary terms. “And don’t tell me your present state means that you’re getting better, like Seth says, because you’re not,” I said. “You haven’t walked for how long?—two weeks over a year now, I think it is. Not even with your typing table. I’m aware that you may be coping with certain lifetime challenges through the psychic method, so the question becomes one of how far you want to carry the thing. In this probability I put physical survival first, obviously, but do you? Sweetheart, I’ll have to admit that sometimes I wonder….”

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.

4. I first mentioned what was to become If We Live Again early in the Preliminary Notes for the Preface to Dreams—those leading off the private session of September 13, 1979. By the time I wrote the opening notes for Session 886 in Chapter 2, three months later, Jane had decided the book would contain “some of the poetry she has dedicated to me over the years since we met in February 1954.” Seth agreed. Rather immodestly, I present below the first verse of a love poem Jane wrote for me on November 5, 1965. It’s in Section Two, which section bears the title of If We Live Again itself. Jane often reworks her poetry, but for the book she changed only two words and added one in this verse which she wrote over 16 years ago. She was 36, and we’d been married for 11 years:

5. It was inevitable that Jane’s images would remind me of the note I’d written well over two months ago, on re-creating the past, or updating it, through nostalgia. In Chapter 11 of Dreams, see Note 8 for Session 936. Her images led me to search out the collection of battered black-and-white snapshots of her that somehow, some way, she’d managed to save from her early childhood. Along with scraps of her youthful poetry, the pictures are the only physical remnants she possesses of her first years, and studying them anew I realized just how valuable they really are. I talked of having them copied and enlarged by a professional photographer; I speculated about eventually having some of them reproduced in a book. That idea may have to wait, however: For some years Jane hasn’t cared to be photographed—or have pictures of herself shown, no matter when they had been taken.