“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

SESSION 939, JANUARY 25, 1982
9:48 P.M. MONDAY

(Another two months have passed during Jane’s production of Dreams. We had a very subdued holiday season. Now the new year is almost a month old; the weather is cold but the frozen ground is practically bare of snow. Our mail is as heavy as ever. Those “unused gaps of time,” those long weeks passing between recent chapters for Dreams, have become very worrisome to me, for they fall outside of Jane’s natural creative rhythms. She hasn’t even had many private sessions during those breaks in book work; she gave but two private sessions between chapters 10 and 11, and four between chapters 11 and 12. That very infrequency itself is an obvious “symptom” of our psychic and physical challenges.

I regard the first one of the four sessions Jane held before starting Chapter 12 as being a key session, an excellent one indeed for us. We feel that it marks a turning point—yet, paradoxically, we’re not at all sure that we can turn in the right direction! Jane came through with the session just a week after giving the last session for Chapter 11 [on November 24, 1981], and I’m presenting it here in Note 1.

We discussed that session thoroughly the next day, December 2, and Jane ended up defending herself from what I had written in some of my notes. She showed more animation than I’d seen her display for some time, and I was glad to agree that she made some good points; others I disagreed with. I asked her to type a summary of her remarks for inclusion with our next session. At the same time, I tried to make it easier for her to do the typing itself. I’ve made things for her before.² Recently she had been having trouble comfortably lifting her hands high enough to reach her typewriter as it sat upon either the oak table in her writing room, or upon her standard metal typing table. I took the time to build a lower, very solid table whose top rides just above her knees as she sits in her office chair; she can operate her typewriter much more easily at that lower level. She makes mistakes typing because her fingers aren’t working well, but is anxious to improve her accuracy through working. [Nor is her handwriting as steady as it used to be.] As she typed on December 3: “Rob just made a new wooden typing table, right height, etc, and I am trying it out now. It worked great, want to start up journal, want to start project… want to get sessions started up again too or tell myself so anyhow. “

However, she did not type the summary I’d asked her for. That evening she held the second of the four private sessions she was to give before starting Chapter 12 of Dreams.³

Our program of discussing Seth’s material, as well as our own ideas—which included our taping suggestions for Jane to listen to daily—had come out of those sessions for December 1 and 3. Obviously, we were trying to encourage Framework 2 activity. I spent the next day rearranging all of Jane’s working paraphernalia in her writing room, following her directions, and that re-creation of her world helped also. “Rob and Seth started us on a new program and though we’ve hardly begun, I do feel some relieved more peaceful,” she typed in part on the morning of the 5th as she sat at her new low table, “yesterday i felt the place clicking about me. P.M. I did a little mail but didn’t really get into the notes which are to be a part of the program. My typing is still pretty poor but do know this will improve. I don’t feel any flow in these notes but I do feel a submerged flow rising and i do feel… centered, more content… as I get this far I feel a definite block of expression and some mild enough panic but recognize the fact that a feeling of repression came as I decided to do my notes… writing down at once and will tell rob.”

“I begin as best I can… read sessions,” Jane typed on December 7, as she recorded her efforts, and mine, at carrying out our program for her. We played the tape of suggestions we’d made. “I do feel a blockage of expression; my ass hurts typing—a sweet soreness of joints I sit on that brings tears briefly; yet it is a stretching sensation, same right arm. so much I’d like to write down,” she noted later in the day. For although we didn’t know how they’d done so, our suggestions had helped her tune into a number of dear images of her girlhood in her hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York: She’d seen herself at an amusement park—Kaydeross—located on the shore of Saratoga Lake, just outside of town; she’d seen herself “jumproping very young” in the recreation field across the street from the Catholic grade school she had attended; she’d seen and interacted with family members, all dead now. That night she had very vivid dreams.

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.

Five months ago, in the opening notes for Session 936 in Chapter 11 of Dreams, I wrote that by the end of August 1981 Jane had roughed in the first three chapters of The Magical Approach to Reality: A Seth Book. In all of the weeks following she did only some very loose work on three more chapters. On Wednesday, December 9, my idea that she would probably never finish the book was reinforced by her own note.⁶

That evening Jane came through with the third of the four private sessions she held before beginning Chapter 12. Her hearing and visual difficulties were continuing. Once again Seth offered us material relative to our daily program—but that’s not the only reason I decided to present the full session in Note 7.

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:

After the holidays Jane worked on several small acrylic paintings of flowers that friends had given us for Christmas. She wrote a few notes and tried some poetry; her handwriting continued to be unsteady; she still made many errors typing. However, she also began to occasionally manifest an upsetting new development—a slight tremor in her voice. I then realized that each time I heard that certain agitation her speech slowed down slightly. We thought the voice effects were connected to her hearing and vision difficulties, which also fluctuated to some degree. Jane was concerned and not concerned, and once again I saw in her that innocent acceptance of the reality she was creating—the one I often had such trouble understanding [as well as my own participation in creating it!]. Not that she uncomplainingly welcomed this physical challenge, but that she overlaid its arrival with a frame of mind in which she kept going as best she could. I tried not to alarm her as we talked, while mentally I speculated about whether the vocal changes could be a further sign of her withdrawal from the world. Before we held the private session for last December 1, I had admitted to her my fear that she was gradually cutting down on her communication with the world.¹¹

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.

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.

Jane had noted on the 15th that she wanted to finish Seth’s book soon. She made no more entries in her journal over the next ten days. She did more painting. Rather than intensify, her voice tremors lessened on some occasions and disappeared on others. The slowdown in her speech was more persistent, although it didn’t become more pronounced in any manner. Following our own suggestions, we did fairly well at not dwelling upon those vocal challenges; we sent out no signals to Seth, asking him to discuss them. And Jane did have the energy to firmly begin dictating Session 939 for Chapter 12 of Dreams at 9:48 P.M. on Monday evening, January 25:)

(10:39. After giving a few paragraphs of material for Jane, Seth ended the session at 10:58 P.M.)

NOTES: SESSION 939

1. Eight weeks later, I’m presenting only a summary of my very long notes for this private session, which Jane held on Tuesday evening, December 1, 1981. The notes stemmed from the unexpected discussion we began at about 8 o’clock, a few minutes after Jane had told me she wanted to have a session on herself. I returned to the living room and found her leaning back on the couch, asleep—and with a lighted cigarette in her hand. A long cone of ash fell into her lap as she woke up with a start: “I never never do that when I’m here alone!” she exclaimed, chagrined. Yet she dozed again when I went out to her writing room after her office chair, which I use while taking notes for the sessions. I thought her sleeping after saying she wanted a personal session was a poor sign. Yet I think that in this session Seth reached core beliefs of ours that we have yet to fully grasp, let alone surmount. He can do better for us only if Jane allows him to, but after we’ve struggled for so many years I’m no longer sure that she can.

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.)

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 listened to me go on and on: “I’m on the point again—very close—of refusing to help you with the sessions any longer. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I don’t know what else to do. If we don’t see some pretty drastic improvements within the next few sessions, you may end up talking to the wall if you want to have one, or into a recorder if you can operate it. I can’t stop you from speaking for Seth by yourself, or doing it with someone else, but I can refuse to encourage you myself.

“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.”

And so for the first time that I could remember, Jane actually said that she was considering medical help, even if only under certain conditions. Just recently she began having difficulties with occasional double vision and with hearing. The latter impairment has already cut down on our communication, for almost automatically these days I think twice about speaking to her unless we’re face to face. (The last time in Dreams that I mentioned trying to get her to accept medical care was five months ago, in June 1981: In Chapter 9, see the opening notes just preceding superscript number 18 for Session 931.)

“Ruburt does not owe me anything. If he decided not to have sessions, or not to operate in the so-called psychic arena, this does not mean that he would be a failure in any way. He does not owe me a sense of commitment. The material I have given on his health I will, however, stand behind, whether or not it is difficult for you to understand, or whether or not you can bring yourselves to accept it.

“I will bring the session to a close, then. I have ranged within it on several occasions this evening, to see what other glimmerings might have immediately come to my attention, and I wish you as always a fond good evening.”

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.

“But that would be awful to give up the sessions,” she exclaimed as I wheeled her into the bathroom.

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.

3. After the personal session of December 1 (see Note 1), I’d suggested to Jane that we initiate a daily program of reading and discussing Seth’s material. In keeping with that idea, two nights later Seth recommended that we begin studying the sessions on the magical approach to life and on the sinful self. Then he commented in general on the cyclic and beneficial nature of such undertakings:

“Left alone, the self knows how to utilize such rhythms. If you trusted the characteristics of the basic natural person, you would not need such sessions as ours, generally, in the world at all—for such knowledge would be part of it and implied in its cultural organizations, and the daily habits of the people.”

I’d also written in the notes for the last session (of December 1) about our difficulties producing Mass Events, and that Jane has “done little on Magical Approach recently….” Seth this evening:

“The sessions on the magical approach… can serve as valuable springboards to release from your own creative areas new triggers for inspiration and understanding, and hence for therapeutic development. That should be part of the program, in other words, regardless of what Ruburt intends to do bookwise with those sessions.

Very clear in Seth’s material, I told Jane after the session, is his message that it would be a great mistake for us to give up the highly creative endeavor of the sessions, regardless of whether they were ever published. I said that I was delighted to retract the observation I’d made before the last session—that on deeper levels she didn’t want to hold the sessions any longer. I added that once again we could try searching the creative matrix of the symptoms themselves for the solutions to her challenges, and mine as well, for that is where those solutions will be found.

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:

I like that entire poem, of course—but in a different way I like just as much the untitled poem Jane wrote on a different subject almost 15 years later (on August 25, 1980). She was 51. I borrowed this poem for the opening notes for Session 920, in Chapter 9 of Dreams, and urged her to give it a title and present it in If We Live Again. Jane did so on both counts, in Section Six: “Strange Liberty.” She also changed the format of the poem, but not the words of what I consider to be one of her best creative insights.

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.

“December 9, 1981. Each time I think of beginning MAGICAL APPROACH I feel this reluctance; I’m not sure what bugs me, the copying of records, putting together the days events or what—but i want more of the fun and magic of it for myself, and less hard work. I’d planned a consecutive story line book including some of robs dreams with interpretations yet feel strain there now, showing how this detail or that one fits the picture, this noon it came to me that the approach seemed to rational at this time; i wanted one that was lighter in tone, quicker yet more expansiveso if anything the books technique would be magical itself…. forcing the reader to make some connections from other-than-time frameworks. a possibility came to me of a part 1 consisting of the original abridged sessions one after the other with robs notes included but nothing of mine at all. This followed by a part 2 with chapters following an intuitive shape favoring more association, the sinful self stuff too, showing the portions of psychic motion, could start with a chapter 1 very like the one I have organized and then just have a session or so a chapter until part 2. i don’t know, its a thought…

7. Seth not only designed his material in this excellent session to help Jane and me, but others as well. In my opinion, he also answered my wife regarding the note she’d written earlier in the day (see Note 6, above). Aside from all of those points, however, I think it quite remarkable that despite her physical hassles Jane approached the rolling cadences, the inspired certainty of delivery, that she’d achieved over two years ago in some of her sessions for chapters 1 and 2 of Dreams.

“To some extent tonight’s relatively brief session should remove senses of urgency on your parts, or of self-criticism, that make you question when or how [you] can ‘learn to make’ the magical approach work in any specific way—that is, why you cannot learn to make the approach work in, say, helping Ruburt’s condition in a faster, more effective fashion.”

“To even sense the existence of that kind of reality, however, you must have already ‘opened the doorway’ to Framework 2, and begun to use the magical approach as your natural instinctive way of dealing with experience.” (With a smile:) “End of session, and a fond good evening.” (10:05 P.M. “Good night, Seth.”)

8. Seth had commented earlier this month on some of the reasons for such cyclic behavior. See Note 3 for this session.

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.

11. In Note 1 for this Session 939, in Chapter 12, see the opening notes for that December 1 session.

12. See Note 7 for this Session 939.

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.

The panspermian theory is that life reached the Earth from a living organization permeating our entire Milky Way galaxy, and that there is a creator, or intelligence, or God out there. In talking with Jane this noon I went the step further by saying that the galaxy itself is alive—not merely full of life. Jane and I discussed various ways that All That Is could have seeded life on earth through the roles of probabilities, and how certain successive forms could take root upon the earth when environmental and psychic conditions were right, and so give the appearance of an evolutionary progression. All That Is, I said, might have offered those same incipient forms to the living earth many times, only to have the earth reject them or fail to develop them for many reasons. But even these latest scientific theories are based upon ideas of a past, present, and future; their proponents do not consider that basically time is simultaneous—that the universe is being created now. We had an interesting discussion. In Chapter 1 of Dreams, see sessions 882 and 883.

15. Seth may think that his own term, “value fulfillment,” “is woefully inadequate to express the nature of life’s diversity, purpose, or meaning,” but over two years ago, in Chapter 2 of Dreams, he gave what I think is an excellent interpretation of that quality. In Session 884 for October 3, 1979, he came through very emphatically in one of Jane’s best sessions: