“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

My goal, then, has come to be the publishing of all of Jane’s work, or at least as much of it as I can, including not only the Seth material but her poetry and fiction and notes and journals—to finally be able to offer it as a great whole for study in what we call the “future.” For if all of a person’s lifework isn’t known, how can its true worth in all of its human complexity ultimately be known? Sometimes I think I’m a slow learner: It took me a while to realize, for example, that the responses to the Seth material by mail and in person—and now electronically—are actually myriad extensions of that work, showing in all of their varieties the questions and answers it’s raised and the beneficial effects it’s had on the many who have communicated since Jane held her first real session on December 2, 1963—and on those who still do. The mail in any form is great! Seldom does a day go by that I don’t answer letters. I’m glad to do it, even when I fall far behind.

Very soon after that initial revelation, Jane and I began the actual sessions when we sat with a Ouija board on December 2, 1963. See Volume 1 of The Early Sessions. Hardly a “coincidence,” that psychic and psychological progression, from an easy-to-use popular device to something much more personal and encompassing like idea construction. Yet the board had played its part. One can even say that Jane’s basic intuitive knowledge of idea construction led us to use the board in the first place.

The camouflage days pass with blessed speed as Laurel and I savor them in all of their complexities. Our journey together continues with new insights, new challenges, new understandings. We were married on December 31, 1999. Thank you, Laurel. I love you.

When he spoke through Jane for the first time in Session 4 on December 8, 1964, Seth not only gave us his own entity name—Seth, of course—but those for Jane and me: Ruburt and Joseph. He was quite amused that Jane didn’t particularly like the name Ruburt. “Strange to the strange,” he told us. See Volume 1 of The Early Sessions. Yet Ruburt and Seth met on certain common grounds that were to be developed in depth over the years. Indeed, each one of us had particular qualities of life—memories, emotions, events—to explore “this time around.” I’m sure that Jane and Seth, those two parts of our triumvirate, are relatively involved in their afterdeath challenges, each from her and his nonphysical viewpoint. Just as I’m doing in this earthly environment that I’m helping to create—preparatory, possibly, to joining them “later” in our ordinary terms of time. That, I’m sure, is a privilege I’ll have full freedom to carry out, if I choose to.

February 2, 1954: I was so struck by Jane’s beauty that I asked her to pose for me soon after we met in Saratoga Springs, New York. She wasn’t to begin creating the Seth material per se until December 6, 1963.

They were also the forms, with the addition of fiction, that she worked within for the first nine years of our marriage on December 27, 1954. She began the sessions in December 1963.

I drew Jane a few weeks before our marriage on December 27, 1954. We had always been dedicated to our arts, but little did we realize what great changes were to take place in our lives and how we were to help ourselves and others with Jane’s gift of the Seth material.

Jane and I were married on December 27, 1954 at the home of my younger brother Loren and his wife Betts in Tunkhannock, PA, some 55 miles south of Sayre. Betts’s father, Leonard Meeker, who was a Methodist minister, performed the ceremony. In his later years my father, Robert Sr., had trained himself to become an excellent professional photographer. As a wedding present he created an album of the ceremony that Jane and I treasured. I still do. We rented an apartment in Sayre. I painted signs, then designed clothing labels for a printing plant there, and painted and wrote on weekends.

She began the sessions on December 2, 1963 and published The Seth Material in 1970. Before that welcome event, however, we had held 510 sessions over five years and two months, mainly for ourselves as we sought to understand and let develop her most unusual abilities as she spoke for and wrote about Seth, with all that such creatively unorthodox behavior implied. We never asked others in the field to help us play “the psychic game,” as we understood it from our reading. We just wanted to do our own thing. Mischa died, and I buried him in a flower bed in back of 458, as we called the house; we were left with our two cats. Those 510 sessions have now been published in nine volumes by Rick Stack of New Awareness Network, Inc. (See that last volume for my drawing of Mischa.) It took a while after the publication of The Seth Material for the first seemingly innocuous signs of conflict within Jane’s psyche—the symptoms—to appear.

The door to Apartment 5 was closed. Locked? Was anyone home? I didn’t try to find out as all of us stood there. Seth had first come through Jane in the living room of that apartment, in Session 4 on December 8, 1962. Thirty-nine years ago. I couldn’t believe it....

DECEMBER 20, 2002

Laurel sent a copy of her letter to Debbie Serra, who in this busy season included these passages in her e-mail reply of December 30, 2002: “...I also believe there are some people and perhaps animals more sensitive to the ‘old ways’ and beliefs in our communicative relationships with one another. The bird that swooped near us was spectacular. He or she knew we were not a threat. I think he or she was also testing our sensitivity which is why the bird remained in the tree regarding us.”

Robert F. Butts
Sayre, PA
December, 2002