“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.

Jane worked less and less as the holiday season approached, although on December 15 she gave her fourth private session; its most evocative subject matter—art and child psychology—is separate from our themes for Dreams. We saw only a few friends. I was busier than ever, however: running the house, preparing for Christmas, helping my wife in various ways, working on the earlier notes for Dreams and trying to accumulate some painting time. Jane didn’t do any more on her manuscript for Magical Approach, nor anything about obtaining the medical help she’d mentioned on the first of December. Our program of self-help gradually began to diminish, as had many of them before.⁸ Finally, in an effort to cheer up Jane one day as she sat idly at the typing table in her writing room, I tried a variation of a tactic that had worked so well for her inception of Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche almost six and a half years ago: This time, standing in back of her, I put my arms around her and rolled a clean sheet of paper into her typewriter—but here’s the note she wrote the next day:

“I don’t want to do that,” Jane said. “I wouldn’t mind trying some things on my own here at the house, like getting an eye, ear, nose and throat doctor here, or an orthopedist—but no hospital. But I’m shocked at what you’re saying about giving up on the sessions.”

2. Six months ago, I described how Floyd Waterman had helped me rebuild a narrow old straight chair for Jane, and equip it with casters, so that I could more easily steer her into certain parts of the hill house. In Session 931 for Chapter 9, see the opening notes following superscript number 14.

10. Jane had responded beautifully to my suggestion when she began dictating Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche: I’d playfully told her at suppertime that she was going to start a new Seth book in the session which was due that evening—and three hours later she did just that. Although she was writing her own Psychic Politics while I worked on the notes for “Unknown” Reality, she was between Seth books, and I wanted her to have one in progress so that it “could underlie her daily life like a foundation.” See the opening notes for the first session in Psyche—the 752nd for Monday evening, July 28, 1975. We held that session four months after moving into the hill house.

Jane initiated Sumari in ESP class, and largely let it go when we ended class and moved to the hill house four years later. As with her speaking for Seth, her greatest power and drama in singing was engendered in class. For the most part in our regular, private, and book sessions, Seth speaks to me with a quieter, businesslike energy; I always feel his vigor and humor, but he isn’t nearly as loud or quick or boisterous as he was in class. Jane was obviously sensitive to the infusion of energy from 30 or more people during those gatherings, and through her Seth responded masterfully. The same was true of her singing, when she ranged from the most delicate soprano trills and nuances to powerful, much deeper emanations.

I have come to feel that I should have encouraged Jane to speak and sing much more often in Sumari, either when we were alone here at the house, or on a Friday night, say, when we had company. I gave up doing so partly because I hesitated to add to her pressure to perform, whether or not the material might be recorded, and partly because, except on rare occasions, she didn’t offer to sing—or to have a session—as she used to spontaneously do in our downtown apartments.

Once in a while, Jane will sing to herself as she sits at her table in her writing room and looks east through the sliding glass doors at the side street rising into the woods to the north. Across the street is the white clapboard house of our neighbors, whom we love and who love us. Our friends have a large yard beside their house. It’s filled with trees and flowering shrubs—a view Jane cherishes, and one she has painted and written about a number of times. Indeed, she was looking out at that view at four o’clock on a foggy morning in June 1979 (over two and a half years ago) when she was inspired to name that certain part of her “that is as clear-eyed as a child” the “God of Jane.” Out of that insight she titled the book she had started a few weeks earlier The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto. In Chapter 9 of Mass Events, see the opening notes and Note 1 for Session 860.

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.