“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

My hospital adventure is still symbolic and literal to me in the most intimate of terms. It’s made me think often about the tremendous variety of reassurances the “dead” can choose to offer the “living.” A number of Jane’s readers have sent me communications they claim to have received for me from Jane in her after-death state. I’m making a collection of these for study. In the midst of my sorrowing for my wife, how did I — and how do I — know which of the communications are really from her? Or whether any portions of some of the messages may be? I soon learned that in each case I had to rely upon my own sensual and psychic equipment to intuitively know what to believe, or to be moved by, sometimes to the point of tears. Obviously, I can judge my feelings about what’s right and not right in my own experiences with a discarnate Jane much more easily than I can gauge the outside of someone else’s communication. But since I believe the Seth Material is valid, it would be very arrogant of me to think that none of Jane’s readers except me had legitimately tuned into her where she is now or perhaps touched upon her world view.

Valerie’s material raises as many questions as it gives answers for, of course. Are her messages really from Jane, or is she “only” telepathically picking up from me what I want to hear, and flashing it back to me from her trance states — as communications from Jane? An unbelieving scientist would say that Valerie is hardly in touch with a discarnate Jane, since science doesn’t accept survival of death. Nor would the idea of reaching Jane’s world view be considered, or telepathy from me, for both of those concepts are scientifically unacceptable. The most parsimonious view — the simplest, stingiest one — would be that through studying the Seth Material Valerie subconsciously divines the replies I want from my dead wife, and in all subjective innocence comes through with her trance messages for me, to fit my own stubborn belief in Jane’s survival.

You will join me as I have joined others.
No physical form or physical thought
can express my existence.
The term love, with its message
of caring for another,
is the most important of our
messages in the physical.
Seth Two is to me now what Seth was to you.
I am a step higher but not removed.
Yet, I have changed enough since “my
death” that it is difficult,
at times, to relate to your existence.
The love and the emotions you feel are
the connectives between us.
My love for you has not changed but expanded
in a way you do not comprehend.
Physical needs are for physical beings,
and I understand and know this.
Touch is important at your level.
My new or returned mind loves you more
deeply than in our earth time together,
but it is also much more
understanding of physical need.
When I said, “Be for me as I would
be for thee,” I didn’t mean to limit you.
Be the physical person you need to be,
as you are physical for a limited and
for a purposeful reason.
Enjoy physical reality between others,
for the mind endures and exists
beyond your understanding and existence.
I love you as you were
and as we will be.
Your now is for you to enjoy.
I never judge your actions, and this
I repeat with love and utmost understanding.
Be yourself and in being yourself
you will be for me as I would be for thee.
You do well and I watch you often.
Continue to love physical life
while you are physical.

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.

[...] But even though I think telepathy is possible … I can’t quite believe that in a trance state, through me, another personality read someone else’s mind — that’s it!” I said. [...] And that made me question if I was really far more disturbed than I think I was because you didn’t help with Miss Cunningham the other night. [...] Have a secondary personality give you the dickens over it — and in front of company — with me supposedly in the clear, taking no responsibility for it at all.”

[...] He has achieved a state in which he can receive inner data from me more readily. But beyond that, he is now able in some small way to contact me. That is, I have contacted you in the past, and now he is gaining the ability to contact me.

[...] “Like me, in the Denmark life you told me about?”

[...] Yet Rob always managed to help me see things in perspective, and this time, he again helped me maintain faith in myself and my abilities.

This was enough to send me to Miss Cunningham’s apartment, hoping to bring up the name in conversation. (I wasn’t about to tell anyone about the Ouija board messages.) It struck me odd, also, that Miss Cunningham would be in any way connected with our Ouija activities. This tie-in immediately reminded me of the July dream, of course.

[...] I didn’t take this very seriously at first, but he also said that he knew an elderly woman who worked with me at the local art gallery where I had a part-time job. When questioned, this woman told me that she had known such a man, though he had merely been an acquaintance.

[...] So the early sessions intrigued me, but, intellectually, I couldn’t accept reincarnation. [...] Those ideas were imbedded in me so thoroughly that I would never doubt them.

For me, the episode was amazingly vivid, the scenes clear and bright in my mind’s eye. [...] (Or, someone might say, like dreaming vividly while awake.) But, for me, then, it was simply a completely new state of consciousness and awareness, a psychological experience like none I’d known before.

He looked right through me, taking no notice of me at all. [...] 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. He never saw me at all.

Unknowingly, in my poetry I had barely begun to form some concepts that would help me. Just before the sessions began the idea of “The Idiot” came to me as a symbol of inner truth that appears to be complete nonsense to the reasoning mind at times; or at best, highly impractical in normal living. [...]

[...] 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. Either that, or Seth and the material — still so strange to me — were giving answers that I refused, so far, to accept in practical terms.

And while I persisted in my uncertainity, Seth continued to explain the nature of the interior universe, giving clues and hints that I would eventually follow, laying down the framework that would allow me to deal with precisely those questions that concerned me.

I just snorted when Rob told me about this data after the session. Still, the session impressed me. [...] This feeling was directed at me as well as at Rob, which meant that it wasn’t coming from me. After the session was over, it seemed to follow me out into the kitchen while I finished the dishes.

This method suits me temperamentally. It seems to me that automatic writing could become like an institution. [...] Often they remind me of other things I would like to say … I have never trusted the written word half as much as I trust the spoken word, and on your plane it is difficult to trust either, but as I mentioned, I always enjoyed conversation, which is the liveliest of the arts.

[...] There were voices and footsteps in the hall, Rob told me later, but I was not bothered at all. [...] The suspension and suspense is killing me. [...]

Because Ruburt deals in words, it is easy for me to communicate in this way. He automatically translates inner data given by me into coherent, valid and faithful camouflage patterns. [...]

“Everything that she said was of a piece,” Rob told me later. [...] The description of her death really struck me. [...]

[...] She did tell me, when asked, that Decatur had a population of about twelve thousand.

[...] It is like the branch that moves, so that you know the wind by its effects; and a windbag like me by the billowing gale of my monologues.

This session impressed me quite a bit, since after it I felt much less tired than I had earlier. [...]

“Do you realize that the entire session contained more psychological insight into me and more hints into my behavior than I’ve ever received in any way whatsoever? And that Seth just used me as an example to make more general pertinent points about the personality?” Rob grinned. “If it didn’t bother me, I don’t know why it’s bothering you.”

[...] Rob told me later that he was squirming some, as I paced back and forth, delivering this material as Seth.

I was crushed by this material when Rob read it to me after the session. [...]

[...] The whole concept fascinated me. [...]

[...] He could see the change that came over me while I was speaking for Seth, and Seth inspires confidence. [...] Through me, Seth related to Rob. [...] It was a terrific change for me to suddenly have to rely on someone else — even Rob — to tell me what “I” had been saying for a period of two or three hours.

[...] As the session shows, Seth apparently decided that it was time to take me in hand. From here on, he would continue to comment on my trance experiments and teach me to regulate them.

(With a laugh, Rob told me that as Seth, I’d been pacing up and down the room, giving “myself” the dickens about the trance experiment, then switching to the humorous comparison of his voice and mine. [...] Back in those days, I wasn’t about to have a trance personality order me about, even for my own good. [...]

Joseph, when your hands grow tired of taking notes, I do wish you would volunteer to take a break and relieve me of an ever-growing compassionate concern for your physical condition. Surely after our pleasant chat the other evening, you should know that nothing of this sort would offend me. [...]

[...] The second same over me around 11:30 P.M. as we sat around the table eating. [...] The wave of feeling washed over me very strongly this time. Although everyone about me was talking quite loudly, I had the weird sensation of voices within me, of mouths open or crying in soundless rhythm.

I also sensed, or felt, a great chute or trough or pathway of some kind that reached down into me from above me, or at least from outside of me. [...]

[...] When it first swept over me, I wondered if the wine could be responsible, though actually I had drunk little. [...] I had the odd feeling that the sensation was related both to the subject of conversation, and to some kind of message or communication I felt within me.

[...] I was alone in the art room, eating lunch at my desk, when the feeling swept over me. There was no warning or pain, but the surprise doubled me over my desk. [...]