“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Along with my conscious contacts with Jane, I created a number of metaphors, or implied comparisons, revolving around her death. I’ll describe one now and work in another one later. These constructs, which are sometimes quite effortless, show how I began to express my longing for my wife very creatively even during a time of great stress. I’ve often become aware of the one to follow; it reminds me of certain speculations and truths that I think will always be with me.

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.

My own imperfect recollection following Tam’s request that I look for it was that Seth, Dreams … was an unfinished collection of records, ideas, and chapters that Jane had struggled with for several years, without selling it. Instead, what I found in a box in the basement was, to my amazement, a completed manuscript — a full book ready to go, one as fresh as it had ever been, and my wife had struggled with it. What emerged as Laurel Davies and I searched Jane’s and my records, including early Seth sessions, was a long story of our doubts and gropings in an area in which we had no guidance except for our own explorations. Seth, Dreams … was rejected by three major publishers while Jane worked on it during 1966-67. She was still an unknown in the field; by mid-1966 she’d had only one small psychic book, How to Develop Your ESP Power, published. Our subject of interest itself was largely denied validity by the social, psychological, and scientific establishments. We were still operating alone, then, even though Jane had been speaking for Seth for about three years. In spite of all of her questions, however, her strong creative vitality — her intuitive insistence upon using her most unusual abilities — kept her focusing ahead, and I helped her as much as I could. I’m still astonished when I think of what Jane was to accomplish in the next few years.

‘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.’

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.

[...] The bedroom arrangement is fine, and if no one will blame Ruburt’s subconscious, then I would venture one further suggestion. [...]

(As we sat speaking with Mark, Jane finally told me that Seth wanted to have a session since we had missed last night’s regular one. [...]

[...] For that matter, I welcome a witness, and it is time you had one for your own edification, not mine, and it should do our nervous pigeon, Ruburt, some good.

[...] And if you consider the wires as forming cubes … then the cubes could also fit one within the other, without disturbing the inhabitants of either cube one iota — and these cubes are also within cubes, which are themselves within cubes, and I am speaking now only of the small particle of space taken up by your plane and mine.

One of the most fascinating was an experiment we tried alone one night. [...]

[...] The powder and bullets were kept separate until they were put into the gun, though one or two bullets were always kept ready. [...] They were big bullets — one of the reasons the guns were so large.

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

[...] She said again that he was a poor farmer and that her life had been a lonely one, since she had few friends. [...]

[...] The session was a long one, and he began by emphasizing the fact that all physical sense data was camouflage.)

[...] No one has seen wind, but since its effects are so observable, it would be idiocy to say that it did not exist. [...]

[...] If you look at the observable world you can learn something about the inner one, but only if you take into consideration the existence of camouflage distortion. [...]

One man bent to wash his hands in it
And saw
The skin peel off like dirt,
But the lawn was full
With the falling corpses of the birds,
And when he cried out, no one heard.

[...] He admired her very much as his children, one in particular, found her an excellent teacher. [...]

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

[...] And behind all these questions there was the big one: Was Seth really a personality who had survived death? [...]

The fact is that although no one taught him to see, he sees. The part of himself that did ‘teach’ him to see still guides his movements, still moves the muscles of his eyes, still becomes conscious despite him when he sleeps, still breathes for him without thanks or recognition and still carries on his task of transforming energy from an inner reality into an outer one. [...]

[...] It is one that I now use with my beginning students though then, of course, it was new to us. [...]

[...] Finally I tried to reach out and envelop the feeling of the houses and trees on either side of me — to sense them as if by inner touch, as I passed each one by.

[...] The session, the twenty-second, was one of our first spontaneous sessions. [...]

[...] The tree is dissociated in one manner. [...] It is in a state of drowsiness on the one hand; and on the other, it focuses the usable portion of its energy into being a tree.

[...] It maintains constant awareness and the ability to adjust itself in two completely different worlds, so to speak — one in which it meets little resistance in growing upward and one composed of much heavier elements into which it must grow downward. [...]

[...] For one thing, I distrusted the “prediction” that the Seth Material would be published.

[...] They experience this oneness with their own growth, and they also feel pain. [...]

It is often practical that entities or their various personalities visit one plane before another. This does not mean that one plane must necessarily be visited before another. … You could say also that an entity visits all planes simultaneously, as it is possible for you to visit one particular state, county and city at one time. [...]

[...] A plane may be one planet, but a plane may also exist where no planet is. One planet may have several planes. [...] A plane may be a time … or only one iota of vitality that exists by itself. [...]

[...] There are no rules that hold any living thing down to one form or one kind of existence. [...]

The fact that you slipped so easily into this frame should remind you of abilities that you had at one time in another life; then you misused them. [...]

[...] (No one knew what we were up to, for that matter, except for one close friend. [...]

She is always slightly dubious and doubtful before a session … since she is the one through whom I speak. [...] Usually in our sessions, one inner sense is in strong operation. [...]

The inner senses, however, give much stronger impressions than those given by the outer ones. [...] As I mentioned earlier, you have at your command, even now, an inroad, a relatively accessible one, in what is termed psychological time.

[...] Only one experiment using the tape recorder showed us that our usual procedure was the best one. [...]