“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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:

“In those annals there is legend after legend, tale after tale, history after history describing civilizations that have come and gone, kings risen and fallen, and those stories have always represented c-u-l-t-u-r-e-s (spelled) of the psyche, and described various approaches used by man’s psyche as it explored its intersection with earthly experiences.

“In a manner of speaking, Ruburt’s physical condition represents the bruises, the wounds inflicted upon any individual in his or her long journey (long pause) toward a greater comprehension of life’s experience. In religious terms, you begin to glimpse a promised land—a ‘land’ of psyche and reality that represents unimpeded nature (again, all very intently).

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.

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.