“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:

Neither of us knew how such a tremor and slowdown might influence the sessions, for example: Jane hadn’t spoken for Seth in several weeks, so we had yet to find out! I took comfort in remembering her excellent vocal power when delivering the private session for December 3.¹² Her voice is a powerful and dramatic connective among realities for her, charged with energy and emotion whether she’s speaking for herself, for Seth, or speaking or singing in her trance language, Sumari.¹³ That vocal steadiness and power, coming out of someone whose weight hovers around 100 pounds, has always been most reassuring to us. We tried what Seth had suggested many times: After discussing her voice effects we gave Jane gentle suggestions that they could be greatly minimized, then turned our attention away from them. Actually, I hoped that our almost childlike trust—which I felt was closely related to at least some of the psychological elements involved in her acceptance of the voice challenges to begin with—would make possible their complete disappearance.