“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In more specific terms, I’m organizing this rather short exploration of Jane’s death around these items; a loose chronology surrounding her writing of Seth, Dreams … in 1966-67, and our unsuccessful attempts to sell the book; my acceptance of the survival of the personality after physical death; a waking experience involving my sensing Jane very soon after she had died; a metaphor I created for her death; a dream in which I not only contacted her but gave myself relevant information; another metaphor for Jane’s death; my speculations about communication among entities, whether they’re physical or nonphysical; a letter that could be from the discarnate Jane — one that was sent to me by its recipient, a caring correspondent whom I’ll call Valerie Wood; a note I wrote to Sue Watkins about the death of her mother; some quotations from a published letter of mine; Jane’s notes concerning the relationship we had; and, finally, the poem in which she refers to her nonphysical journeys to come.

Many people know of Jane’s death by now, and this makes it impossible for me to deal with that event in chronological order within her books. By rights, I shouldn’t be mentioning it sequentially until I publish the two books that Jane and I had finished while she was hospitalized — then it would be all right to announce that she is dead! But for convenience’s sake, in Seth, Dreams … I bring together certain events in chronological time; I feel that its having been written some time ago makes this book the ideal place for me to discuss Jane’s death, to unite the “past,” the “present,” and the “future’; I regard it as being next in line after Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, which Prentice-Hall, Inc. is publishing in two volumes in the spring and fall of 1986. In Dreams, “Evolution, “… I stuck to Jane’s production of the Seth Material for that work, plus a strict chronological account of our personal lives while she delivered it. I made no leaps in time to write about her physical death, for to me that sad event lay too far in the future — over two and a half years — from the time she finished dictating Dreams, “Evolution,” … in February 1982.

After Jane’s death I became extremely busy. I had to cope with my grief, and one way I chose was to immediately begin keeping elaborate records in and writing essays for a series of “grief notebooks.” I told no one about the notebooks, or the three drawings I had made of Jane as she lay in her bed right after her death. I was obligated to spend many months finishing a Seth book — Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment — that we had started way back in September 1979, long before she went into the hospital; as I had planned to, I resumed work on that project the day after she died. (Jane was cremated the next day, in a process we had agreed upon several years ago.) I also worked upon two other books we collaborated upon after she had been hospitalized. There were many legal matters to attend to, much mail to answer, and more to keep up with.

I couldn’t believe it when I realized that my wife had been dead for a week. As I lived and worked in it, our house looked the same as it ever had. In spite of my sorrow, I presented a cheerful face to the world; I talked and joked, and did everything I was supposed to do. I also discovered what must be a very common phenomenon: Those who knew of Jane’s passing became instantly self-conscious when we met. I felt their embarrassment at their damned-up sympathies, and their fear of the same thing happening to them. They didn’t want to hurt me further. Amazingly, I found myself offering comfort to them, to help them surmount such barriers so that we could talk. My visitors reminded me anew of how private an event Jane’s death is for me, yet how universal it is. How many uncounted quadrillions of times has that transference from “life” to “nonlife” taken place just on our planet alone? And I don’t believe that anyone has tried to cope with questions of life and death any more valiantly than Jane did.

[...] Would she survive death when it came, in meaningful terms? And behind all these questions there was the big one: Was Seth really a personality who had survived death? [...]

[...] As I stood there, suddenly I “heard” Seth tell me, mentally, that my dream had forseen her condition which would lead to her death.

[...] When Seth paused for a moment, he asked, “You said once that the shock of birth was worse than the shock of death. [...]

[...] Death in your terms is a termination but does not involve such immediately critical manipulations. [...]

Malba insisted that she was the same girl I saw die in Levonshire, England, in my earlier trance, except that her death had taken place when she was fourteen, not seventeen as I had reported. [...]

The particular atmosphere surrounding your personalities just prior to the animals’ deaths was short-circuited and filled with inner panics. [...]

In the cats’ deaths, both inherited the peculiar illness, which was a virus, that killed them. [...]

[...] You know that such a tree bark would be death to the tree. [...]

[...] After his death, the second wife went to California to live with the stepson and his family, a fact that further upset Malba.

[...] The description of her death really struck me. [...]

But I still couldn’t quite believe in personal life after death. [...]

[...] And Sarah … the first one … if she hadn’t burned to death, she would have died anyhow at seventeen, of tuberculosis. [...]

There is no way of measuring inner experience, or the psychological experience, rather, of someone who has lost a friend in death, but you do not deny that such an experience happens. [...]