“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Thus, I opened up several years ago to ask Rick to publish the nine volumes of The Early Sessions through his New Awareness Network, Inc. And now, I open up even more to his publication of The Personal Sessions series. As this group of sessions slowly accumulated, often as “deleted” or unpublished portions of “regular” sessions, Jane and I took it for granted that since they were personal they would stay that way. Every session is obviously personal, since Jane delivered them all, but now I’m encouraging the overall intimacy of these personal sessions to seek their own intimate freedom—and of course I know that doing this will not only help others, but me too.

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.

Would Seth have cooperated in such a venture? It didn’t occur to Jane and me to even ask. We moved beyond Frank Watts’s “Timidity has roots of rage.” Seth announced his presence in the next, fourth, session: “I prefer not to be called Frank Watts. That personality was rather collarless (as spelled out on the board).” Also: “I was Frank Watts to learn humility.” So with our obvious consent and the great variety of his very intelligent and fluent discourses, Seth became the discarnate entity who spoke through Jane for the next 20 years and eight months. That “energy personality essence” did his best, always honestly, I’m sure, to help my wife, both as far as he was able to but also, as I came to believe, as far as he was allowed to. Not only because of Jane’s intense early fears in this lifetime, I felt, but also because of past lives, as Frank Watts had indicated. How unusual, I thought as I recorded the sessions in my homemade shorthand, that the conflicts displayed between the two main portions of her immensely creative personality were so open, even while she had the potential to help so many others. And did. Jane was living her challenges just like each one of us does, and her efforts were inextricably bound up with the world even as, I was sure, we were creating our human versions of the earth and its own reality. This taught us that even with Jane’s talents there was more, always more, to create and to learn from. How exciting and frustrating at the same time! In all modesty, there seemed to be much that we could do, feel, want, offer to others. Our mail alone began to speak written volumes, almost always approvingly, that we had never anticipated. How could we have known that would happen? As with other details of our experiences to come, many were still unknown to us on conscious levels—we’d have been incredibly wise to have known it all in advance! Like each one of us, Jane as a physical creature still had to travel her literal paths to experience and knowledge.

Reading these private sessions, one can legitimately ask: “Well, if Jane Roberts was so smart and Seth was so great with all of that personal stuff, why did she come down with the symptoms to begin with? Why couldn’t he cure her, or at least help her?” My answer right here is that those questions were and still are answered to the best of the abilities of Jane, Seth, and myself in these private sessions, even while I keep in mind Frank Watts’s references to Jane’s “Timidity has roots of rage.” from “Previous hates unresolved.” These sessions will detail in many ways and times why my beloved wife, even with all of her creative dedication to her chosen path, ended up with what finally came to be her intractable physical impairments. Part of the answer, as I’ve already noted, is that because of her strong fears from early childhood on, Jane did not allow Seth to tell us all he could have. Not that she was consciously aware of why she refused, and not that the elimination of that barrier alone would have magically wiped away the challenges the two of us were creating. But again and again I felt, I knew, that reincarnational factors were involved, concerning not only Jane, Seth, and me, but a number of other “past” personalities and influences from any of the three of us, and in various camouflage time frames. And what about that influence from the “future,” since Seth maintained that all is now? I didn’t berate Jane to open up more psychically. I saw her struggles (and had plenty of my own). I sensed walls, barriers, and complications there. Some of them arose from the very uniqueness of her position. After all, here she was, speaking in trance for a personality who told us he’d last lived on Earth in Denmark 300 years ago—even if there is no such thing as time!

The session is crammed with fascinating material. See Volume 2 of The Early Sessions series of nine volumes, published by New Awareness Network, Inc.

In 1931 in Saratoga Springs, New York, Jane’s father, Delmer Roberts (or Del) chose to exercise the probability that he would leave his wife Marie and their daughter Jane, who was not yet three years old. Marie’s mother, Mary Finn, called Minnie, lived with the family and often served as Jane’s nanny. Jane was a second child following her mother’s earlier miscarriage. Already Marie was showing signs of arthritis. Jane and I came to believe that it was hardly accidental that her mother quickly became bedridden—for life—following the departure of her husband. Minnie Finn was killed by a hit-and-run speeding motorist one icy winter day on her way to the corner store to buy the young girl some shredded wheat for supper—a tragedy that Marie never stopped blaming her daughter for. The two went on welfare. A series of housekeepers, of varying abilities and temperaments and staying powers, were provided for them over the early years. The young Jane spent almost two years in a Catholic orphanage for women while her mother was hospitalized. Some of the housekeepers had been—and some still were—prostitutes, Jane told me. They took care of Marie’s physical needs—tasks that in her later teens Jane would often take care of herself. With welfare’s help Marie set up a telephone answering service for local doctors that she ran from her bed. The two women’s Catholicism became even stricter: it was often bolstered by the head of the local church coming to Sunday dinner at the old two-family house at 92 Middle Avenue, in one of the lower-income sections of Saratoga Springs.

A year later Jane made the naive mistake of seeking comfort in a marriage to a new friend, Walter Zeh, who was having his own difficult life with just one parent. By then both were attending Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. Jane was on a liberal arts scholarship awarded to her because of her gifts and work in writing; her husband, a World War II veteran, qualified under a government program and majored in philosophy. Skidmore suspended Jane’s scholarship at the end of her third year because she’d attended an all-night party with three professors and three other students; along with discussions of philosophy there had been drinking and smoking, but very modestly on her part. Her marriage was in the process of breaking up when we met early in 1954. I made no judgments about that relationship. Walt and I got along well.

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.

I also feel that now, years later in earthly time, Jane and Seth are free of each other yet more closely knit than ever before. And me? Yes, I chose to be creatively involved (as I still am, obviously) for my own intuitive reasons—not only as an intensely interested observer and recorder, but as an artist too. Much of my art is rooted in the Seth material, in ways I couldn’t have anticipated before Jane and I began our work together. Seth once said that without my steadying influence Jane may never have developed the sessions as we know them. That may be true, but I’m also sure that she would have expressed her innate creativity in other surely literary ways—and maybe in psychic ways, too! Why not? Look at her The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. But those more acceptable ways, like her “regular” essays but like her poetry most of all, were the ones she had worked in and with from a very early age.

Nor did I brush aside my deep concerns about her symptoms because of the excitement stemming from the appearance, then the steady growth and complexity, of the sessions. Instead we became involved in a long process of trying to understand my wife’s impairments as they fluctuated over the years, and then finally did not leave her completely at all. Seth told us a number of times that Jane did not have arthritis, like her mother Marie did, but had instead started to develop deep self-protective defense mechanisms at an early age as a result of her chaotic and fatherless upbringing.

Even her early intuitive connections with her grandfather, “Little Daddy,” helped only so much. Add to those early fears her later fears of rejection not only by the mainstream publishing world because of the “psychic” nature of her work, no matter how good it was—but also by most of the world in general because of her chosen and unique way of expressing her great creativity: the Seth material. Seth also told Jane that her mother was “an old enemy,” thus implying a reincarnational relationship, but we didn’t demand details at that early stage. Nor did Jane want to. Once again, I felt there were more such hidden conflicts.

Professional writing was simply outside of their experience. They did understand that we had a creative relationship with the arts, and that we obviously loved each other. For whatever psychological and psychic reasons, the lack of communication on that score between the two “sides” suited both. I don’t remember Jane and me showing my parents any of the Seth material, for example, and trying to explain what we were searching for within it. For all of the six years that we held the early sessions, we never mentioned them to my parents as we sought to go our own way. Nor did we discuss with them the information Seth occasionally gave us about them. For that to be possible, my parents would have had to understand what the Seth material was all about. There was no animosity about the situation, let alone conscious curiosity about what to do, on either side, although now I think there must have been at least an unconscious telepathic understanding and acceptance among the four of us.

For example: In Session 510, on January 19, 1970 in Volume Nine of The Early Sessions, Seth remarked: “Now. I have been helping Ruburt. The energy that I would put into sessions has gone into some private talks to him while he slept. These have resulted in necessary insights on his part that will themselves cause the release of energy from the inner self.” And my notes follow: (For the last several days Jane has been telling me about a string of insights and revelations she has been experiencing, both asleep and awake. She feels these are very beneficial and has been putting them to immediate use. She feels she has lately realized a group of truths that she hadn’t understood before, etc.)

Early in this introduction I wrote that late in November 1963 Jane had had an out-of-body experience while writing her essay, The Physical Universe as Idea Construction—that she had looked in at herself from the porch roof outside our windows. That had been the porch she referred to. Long gone.

I also described to our guests the great Seckel pear tree that had grown so beautifully in the back yard, with some of its branches—and fruit— within my reach from the windows of the studio. It must have died years ago, as did its companion, the apple tree I had drawn to illustrate Jane’s poem, “The You-ness of the Universe,” in her book of poems, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time (1975). At the Sayre house I have the large oil painting I did of the sunlight streaming through the windows of the studio on a certain day early in August: the only day in the year that the ever-moving sun casts that particular intriguing pattern of light and shadow across the bare wooden floor.

We had always been very comfortable in the community, and grateful indeed that we had the privilege of living there on our own terms, even though in those early years we usually took in so little money that we lived pretty much from week to week, with no security. Before we moved out of 458, though, Jane’s books began to appear in local and chain bookstores, and the very interesting mail from readers kept increasing, to our great pleasure.

Laurel and I have lived in Sayre since early in 2000 while 1730 sits there unoccupied. The trees and bushes around the house are taller and more luxurious than ever. They make it harder to see the house from the street corner, almost as though they’re offering protective shelter in their own ways. We hire help to maintain the lawn, while each year I vow to fix up the place. Laurel makes the 15-mile trip from Sayre much more often than I do: to look the place over, to pick up the junk mail that’s still addressed to us there in spite of the notices I’ve sent out, and to scatter feed for the birds and animals. She knows I still feel sadness about 1730. I sometimes think I’m almost cowardly about visiting it, as though I fear my emotions could still erupt if I weren’t careful. And of course they do, but I let them out without a struggle usually, in a very subdued manner. And today my feelings about visiting 458 with our guests were also fresh in my psyche.