“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

But first: One day in late November 1963, Jane sat at her writing table in the living room while I left to paint in my studio at the back of the apartment. We often followed this routine when we didn’t have to be out of the house. My wife liked to tune into a radio station that featured classical music while she worked; she kept its volume low enough so that it didn’t bother me. After some time on that particular day I realized that all was quiet—too quiet—out there in the living room. When I went out to see what Jane was up to I was greeted with her breakthrough accomplishment—one that, to put it mildly, was to lead to very unexpected challenges and growths in our lives: Jane held up a sheaf of typewriter paper upon which she had scribbled in large handwriting an essay that had come to her as fast as she could write it down: The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. She didn’t know where the work had come from, how she had produced it. She’d felt as though she was out of her body some of the time, out on the first floor’s porch roof looking in at herself. “What does it mean?” she asked as we discussed it. She was exhilarated, intrigued, cautious, wondering about its ideas—that basically each one of us creates our own reality in the most intimate terms, for example.

We’d borrowed the board from our landlord, James Spaziani, who hadn’t had any success using it with his family. He was to later just give us the board. Jimmy (long deceased) was a kind and outgoing landlord and restaurateur who lived with his wife and three children on the second floor of the old converted horse barn and carriage house in back of the apartment house he owned at 458 West Water Street, where Jane and I lived. He also owned a well-known dine-and-dance establishment in Elmira, Lib’s Supper Club, which my wife and I frequented before the onset of her symptoms. Jimmy was the chief cook at Lib’s. Busy as he was, he always welcomed us when we stepped into his kitchen to say hello.

Jane had read about the Ouija board and expressed casual interest in it, but hadn’t tried to obtain one; nor was there a local supplier. What conscious and unconscious communications, we were to wonder, had led her to mention the board to Jimmy? What kind of a “coincidence” was that, anyhow? Out of all of the apartments for rent in Elmira, why had Jane chosen that one? She had found the apartment. She came to Elmira with me after I’d begun working for the greeting-card company, Artistic, to look for a place for us so we could move from Sayre and save the time and expense of commuting 30 miles a day, five days a week. She found the empty apartment 5 at 458 on her first day of looking. When I picked her up after leaving work she directed me to the apartment, and that was that. Jimmy had lost interest in psychic phenomena long ago.

This seems obvious in retrospect. Her multitudinous abilities also showed in the ESP classes she held from 1966 through 1975, with a few informal meetings after that. When I finish these volumes of personal sessions I’ll be publishing with Rick Stack’s New Awareness Network the transcripts of many of those always hilarious, incredibly active, crowded and loud meetings: full of Seth sessions, member dialogues and repartees and questions that erupted in those weekly classes that Jane held in our apartment’s small living room. I didn’t attend most of them. Usually on class night, Tuesday, I was secluded in my studio at the back of our second-floor apartment, typing from my notes the session Jane had held for the two of us the night before; then I’d be caught up for the Wednesday-night session to come.

Often, I could hear a powerful Seth through two closed doors. And so, we learned more than once in warm weather, could neighbors and passersby on West Water Street when our windows were open. But those occasions were relatively minor: consider the situation inside the house! Long ago, the three floors of the old house, a typical turn-of-the-last-century “mansion” on the main street three blocks west of Elmira’s business district, had been converted into eight apartments. All were continuously occupied during the 15 years Jane and I (and Seth for the last 11 of those years) lived there. Turnover was low, and we knew most of the other tenants, although no more than one or two of them at any time had an inkling of what we were up to with first the sessions and then the addition of the ESP classes. Even now I still correspond with two of those “ex-tenants”—loyal friends indeed!

Nor am I trying to justify class behavior by noting that Jane and I and our guests were much better behaved during the Friday-night gatherings in our apartment. A fine group of young friends with both similar and quite different interests than ours slowly developed, each one, each couple, dropping in at the end of the workweek to relax and talk. All knew of Jane’s abilities, of course, her growing career with its attendant publicity, but that was only a minor subject amid wide-ranging discussions. Once in a while Seth would come through—though usually only by invitation—but that wasn’t the norm by any means. There were too many other things to discuss! Sue Watkins, a dear friend who was to write several books about Jane’s work with the Seth material, lived just down the street for a while before moving to the country. (Sue’s latest, Speaking of Jane Roberts, is crowded with much frank and loving information about Jane and me that I have no room to go into here.) Peggy Gallagher and her husband Bill worked for the Elmira Star-Gazette; as a reporter Peg wrote several well-received articles about Jane and the Seth material. The Gallaghers were the best friends anyone could have, but we loved everyone. Especially as we came to realize that our having such friends made up for interactions with others that Jane and I had largely missed out on in our own earlier relationships. Valuable!

Ed told me that his car was in a garage for repairs. Tomorrow he was to take the bus from Schuylerville to mail his weekly set of strips to the syndicate via the faster service provided by the post office in Saratoga Springs. If I drove upstate, he suggested, I could meet him late in the day at the post office, and then we could go out to his place. Evening was approaching at the end of my 200-mile trip when we met. Now Ed had a new idea after we’d become reacquainted. I paraphrase all of his dialogue even though my memory is good: “Bob, there’s a couple you’ve got to meet—her name’s Jane Zeh and her husband is Walt. She writes poetry, did a column for The Saratogian. I think she’s got real ability. They have an apartment here in town, and her mother lives on Middle Avenue. I’d like to see the place where she grew up—it’s not far out of our way out of town...” Ed added that a few days later, on Saturday night, the Zehs were to join a gathering of friends at his and Ella’s home in Schuylerville.

I had kept my very strong feelings for Jane to myself, or so I’d thought, and despaired at the idea of never seeing her again. I was the complete amateur at dealing with the personal interactions of others. I visited Walt and Jane at their apartment in Saratoga Springs and told them I’d be leaving the area. Jane discussed the decision she and Walt had made. Then, directly to me: “I’m leaving town, with or without you. So which is it going to be?” I was quite unprepared, yet knew at once what my answer would be. Even though I’d had no thought of interfering with, or taking advantage of, any complications between them. I can see Walt now, sitting by the window of their second-story apartment’s small living room, nodding at Jane’s words, his eyes wet. There was never a harsh word between us. Jane’s dog, Mischa, slept at her feet. It was only after Jane had begun the Seth material a number of years later that we realized that she and Walt, both coming from dysfunctional families, had chosen to come together at just the right time for their own mutually creative learning purposes—and that with those purposes fulfilled, each of them was ready to move on by the time I met them. At the time, however, I wasn’t ready to consciously understand such interlocking emotional relationships even though I was playing a part in one of them.

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.

Jane made her first sales of short stories—science-fiction fantasies. And riding her old-fashioned secondhand bicycle she also sold cutlery and household supplies door-to-door for two out-of-town manufacturers, and did well at those efforts, too! She turned down an offer to be a district manager for one of the companies. In 1960 we moved 15 miles across the Pennsylvania border to Elmira, NY, to live in Jimmy Spaziani’s apartment house on West Water Street. I designed greeting cards for a nationally known company, and was to work there off and on for several years. Jane worked part-time as a secretary for Elmira’s Arnot Art Museum, and wrote two unpublished novels—and one that did sell. The Rebellers was published in a two-novel paperback edition that she disliked intensely. Without judging the other author’s work, she just didn’t want to share her first book with anyone else.

Apart from my questions and speculations, I think it significant that Jane had waited until she had produced the first 207 sessions of the Seth material, over a period of a year and 11 months, before she really began to allow Seth to come through with outright personal material about her—as if first the two had to learn to know each other that well by bridging not only space but our historical or camouflage time. This opening volume of The Personal Sessions begins with an excerpt from Session 208, on November 15, 1965. During the nearly two years before that there were very sporadic mentions by Seth about Jane’s challenges, usually occurring as brief interludes that we deleted from the published sessions. Of course, neither one of us ever considered the possibility that many years later these personal sessions would be published.

Next, at Jim’s request we visited the apartment house at 458 West Water Street that Jane and I had lived in when we moved to Elmira from Sayre in I960. We had stayed there until 1975, when we purchased the hill house at 1730 Pinnacle Road in West Elmira. Some years after we had moved out, the apartment house was painted a garish green, a color that was quite out of keeping with all of the other houses in the neighborhood. Now, the color is unevenly faded. The whole sprawling house looks shoddy, sagging almost, in need of general repair.

Actually, Laurel and I drive past 458 often, without paying much attention to it on our way from Sayre to the hill house. But now we were there on its grounds, focusing upon that precious symbol where Jane and I had lived for 15 years. I hadn’t set foot in 458 since the day we’d moved to the hill house 27 years ago. Incredible! Already, as I pushed open the heavy front door for the six of us, I felt like an intruder, that my footsteps were stirring up the past. We tramped noisily up the narrow and turning stairs to face a fire door guarding the second floor. Past that, we were in the narrow hall that led to a similar door guarding a stairwell at the back of the building. The hall was much shorter and gloomier than I remembered it to be. The sounds of our voices were crowded; the space we stood in seemed to be so confining, with the doors at each end, that I marveled that my dear wife and I had lived in the house for all that time. Apartments 4 and 5, the ones Jane and I had rented (we could afford only Apartment 5 for the first several years) opened off each side of the hall. Apartment 4 was empty; its door was on a short chain that let me push it open a bit to peek into a now-deserted living room that Jane and I had known so well.

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....

I pushed open the back fire door and the six of us clumped down the open stairs that Jane and I had used so many times. I worried about being an intruder into the domain of the people who lived in those dingy apartments now. Indeed, as we left the stairs two dogs in a back apartment set up a furious barking as they scratched at what I knew were kitchen windows. A friend of ours had lived in that apartment (and I still correspond with him). I was embarrassed: the dogs’ racket must have bothered everyone in the house. We saw no one, however, and the barking magically ceased as we moved around to the east side of 458 and surveyed it from a small paved parking lot. Once in that spot there had been flagstones and benches beneath an extended roof supported by four sets of wooden pillars. The tin-covered roof had born layers of old vines that had climbed up the pillars from our living-room windows on the second floor. Jane had liked to throw seed and bread crusts into the vines for the squirrels and birds to root out. The pigeons, cardinals, sparrows, blue jays and others had flown over from the Chemung River a quarter of a block away.

From the parking lot I pointed out to our guests the windows of Apartment 5 as they marched along the side of 458 on the second floor. Our landlord, Jimmy Spaziani, had told us that the entire apartment had been the master-bedroom complex of the wealthy merchant who had built the house for his family more than a century ago. The kitchen with its three tiny windows near the front of the house had been a closet; the three bay windows of the living room where Jane had held the sessions and her ESP class had been the main bedroom. Next comes the oversized bathroom with its stained glass window, tiled floor, and marble shower with eight nozzles. Jane and I had really enjoyed that shower! Then comes a smaller room that we had used as a bedroom, with one window in the back wall of the house. Finally, there’s the last room with its windows on three sides as it juts out on iron posts from the back of the house. Originally it had been a sun parlor. The room is open underneath. It had been my studio, and I’d had to insulate the floor.

Meeting the Houston Seth Group was a nice event for Rob and me. Jim and Debbie had driven by to meet us earlier in the summer, and we had corresponded by e-mail discussing their visit. The Houston Seth Group went thru not one but two powerful hurricanes just a month before they visited, a week apart! So we were looking forward to our visitors for several months before they arrived, and worrying about their situation as well.

Each individual, as has always been the case with visitors, had many talents, with a personal viewpoint, and private belief system, regarding meeting with Robert Butts, of the Seth material (and myself), and of seeing Rob and Jane’s apartments and home.