“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At the same time I knew that Jane had some sort of deep commitment. However, this didn’t stop her from giving me a series of face-to-face hugs, very close, smiling like she does in some old photos of her that I’d found in a file yesterday. I was leery of responding too openly to her advances, though, since I didn’t know what her commitment was. A beautiful arching stone bridge was to my right as we talked and hugged. The lawn extending underneath the bridge was an extremely rich green — glowing and pulsing as though it was alive.

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.

‘Oh, sweetheart, if only you were here with me to see this,’ I said aloud to Jane. And as I talked to her I suddenly found myself crying for her again there in the semi-dark night while the wind seethed and roared. Deep wrenching sobs began in my legs and stomach and rose up through my chest. I tried to keep talking to her, but could not. ‘It must be better where you are,’ I finally gasped, ‘but you should see this. It’s so wonderful …’ And as I spoke I intuitively understood that the motion of the wind was an excellent creative metaphor for the motion of Jane’s soul, that its cool feel upon my face could be the physical version of her caring for me ‘from where she is.’ The storm of my grief eased after a while, but the wind and the light rain continued. I dozed. When I woke half an hour later the wind had diminished a great deal. I felt drained. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Was Jane’s soul resting from its earlier great commotion, or had she moved away for the moment while exploring other aspects of her new reality that were perhaps out of range to us earthbound creatures? I crawled back into my bag and slept until dawn.

‘These days I dream about Jane,’ I wrote in my article for Reality Change, ‘and feel her presence just as much as ever, yet my mourning is inevitably enlightened by new forces and experiences. This is just the way Jane wants it to be; she told me not long before she died that she didn’t want me to spend my life in grief and alone. I agreed with her when she said those things but had little idea of the emotional depths of sadness and yearning that one must face and live with before becoming free enough to turn one’s thoughts outward into the world again.’

[...] He said that many of my needs were really based on fears which would have to be faced as time went by, and he discussed several of them in the session. [...]

[...] “I could hardly keep a straight face, hearing Seth make the suggestions and knowing ahead of time what you’d say. [...]

[...] The personality is not actually layered, of course, but continuing with the necessary analogy, beneath the racial memories you look out upon another dimension of reality with the face of this other self-conscious part of you.

It was in this session that Seth made the analogy of the “weird creature with two faces,” one turned to physical reality and one to inner reality, both conscious and aware, each representing one facet of our consciousness.

[...] As the personality on your plane actually changes, expands and grows to its potentialities, as it presents at various times varied images to the world (such as — if you’ll forgive me for using cliches — a smiling face, a sorrowful face), but is still basically the same personality, so on another level does the entity present at various times a varied appearance and speak in a different voice. As the smiling and sorrowful faces also express and expand the personality, so, too, do the various reincarnated personalities express and expand the entity as a whole.

[...] I looked at him fully in the face, running ahead of him, ready to confront him with “What’s the matter with you?” But, instead, I realized that he didn’t see me. [...]

“What was his face like?” I asked.

The mover, the breather, the dreamer
Shares with me this fond flesh.
He is a twin so like myself
That I cannot recognize his face.
He goes his way and I go mine.
We never meet head-on, and yet
I am aware of this ghost
Behind my every word or act.
Who moves? [...]

[...] As a result, it stiffens, and then you have, my well-meaning friend, the cold detachment with which you at one time faced the world.