“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Jane and I had corresponded with Laurel Lee Davies for several years. Five months after my wife’s death, I called Laurel, who was an administrative assistant at a center for the arts and humanities in Los Angeles, California, for the first time. As the many hours of our calls quickly accumulated, Laurel and I came to understand through dreams that we had shared reincarnational relationships. In August of that year — 1985 — she moved to Elmira to work with me in a number of ways. She helped me carry on the massive project of continuing the work that Debbie Harris had begun: copying many more of the thousands of pages of Jane’s and my work for the archives of the library at Yale. She answered mail, and put together a mailing list. She helped me proofread Seth, Dreams, and Projection of Consciousness for Stillpoint Publishing. Later, she helped me proofread the new editions of Seth Speaks and The Nature of Personal Reality that Amber-Allen/New World Library has published. She’s worked as a researcher of Jane’s material for The Magical Approach — the book she has “most dreamed of working on.” Laurel has been Seth’s “metaphysical apprentice,” as she recently put it, for fourteen years now. Even with our differences, our supportive and complicated relationship continues. Yet even so, as the years passed I began to better see that recovery from Jane’s death was going to take the rest of my life; and that within the framework of simultaneous time uncounted millions of others had experienced that truth, were doing so now, and would be doing so. Maybe some day I’ll write in detail about Jane’s and my lives — but not now!

For several years after Jane’s death, I explored possible publishing ventures with old and trusted friends — people who, like Richard Kendall and Suzanne Delisle, sincerely wanted to see Jane’s and my work kept in print. Richard had been a member of Jane’s ESP class in the 1970s. Following her passing, as a paralegal he was also a great help in resolving some old and troublesome publishing hassles. At the same time, I wondered often if it was of any use to try publishing Seth books, old or new — why do so, if sales were falling? Maybe people were tired of the Seth material. Maybe Jane and I had already offered the best we could, for whatever our efforts were worth. The world would certainly go on, regardless.

Sue Watkins, who described Jane’s ESP class so well in her two-volume Conversations with Seth, recently began doing research for Conversations with Jane Roberts: A Multidimensional Memoir.