“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It seems incredible to me that my wife, Jane Roberts, has been dead for more than thirteen months. It’s late October 1985 as I begin this Preface for her Seth, Dreams and Projection of Consciousness. As I have informed many correspondents, Jane died at 2:08 A.M. on Wednesday, September 5, 1984, after spending 504 consecutive days in a hospital in Elmira, N. Y. I was with her when she died. The immediate causes of her death were a combination of protein depletion, osteomyelitis, and soft-tissue infections. These conditions arose out of her long-standing rheumatoid arthritis. I’ll be discussing Jane’s illnesses — her “symptoms” — much more thoroughly in other work. Indeed, I plan to eventually write a full-length biography of her, and am doing research for that project now.

I began thinking about and working upon this Introduction for Seth, Dreams … late in October 1985. As I reread the book I learned that Jane devotes considerable portions of several chapters to material involving our friend, Sue Watkins — her adventures with dreams, projections, and probable realities — and also refers to her in other chapters. Sue published her two-volume work, Conversations With Seth, in 1980-81; her father died two years later. I’ve already referred to Laurel Lee Davies, the young lady who now works with me (and is helping especially with proofreading and answering mail). Ever since she arrived from the West Coast in August, Laurel had wanted to meet Sue, who lives in upstate New York. The three of us finally did meet — a few days after Sue’s mother had died on October 19. Two nights earlier, Sue had had a very strong precognitive dream concerning her mother’s death; she plans to discuss that event in the book she’s writing. Laurel made a card for Sue when we heard about the demise of her mother, and left room inside it for me to write a note. Here’s what I spontaneously produced.

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.

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.

[...] Then I saw the whole thing very clearly, and I said, excited: “She died, at seventeen, there in the cobbler’s shop. She died from burns. [...] He shoved her out into the street and rolled her over and over on the stones and in the dirt; but she died.

[...] He was fifty-three when he died. [...]

[...] The first Sarah, who died at seventeen, never went. [...]

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

According to what she told us, she died in the farmhouse kitchen. [...] She felt a sharp pain in her chest, and died of a heart attack. [...]

[...] He died in 1962 in Marlboro, England. [...]

[...] She was highly amused at the plight of the clergymen of different faiths, who had died, because the circumstances were so different than those they had expected.

[...] Before long, I began to speak for a personality called Malba Bronson, who told Rob that she had died in South Dakota in 1946 at the age of forty-six. [...]

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. [...]

[...] This led Rob to wonder what had caused our three animals to die shortly before the sessions began.

If, for example, our tree bark grew fearful of stormy weather and began to harden itself against the elements, in a well-meaning but distorted protective spirit, then the tree would die. [...]

“Will she be … fully materialized on another plane before she dies in this one?” Rob asked. [...]

[...] Miss Cunningham, Rob, me and all the people that we knew were surely getting shot down; falling through time, we were dying in a descent that we couldn’t understand or control. [...]

[...] Rob “knew” that he was seeing the bedroom in which his brother, Dick, had died in a past life in England. [...]

[...] It merely exists to a fairly vivid degree while you dream or sleep, and it sleeps but does not ‘die’ when you waken. [...]