“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In reviewing them, I’m very pleased to discover that these sessions are as fresh, as creative and perceptive, as they ever were. Talk about the elasticity of “time,” as Seth often did! How much do we consciously know, or think we know, about that ultimately mysterious quality within which we construct our universe, our planet, the most minute portion of each one of us, mental or physical, during each moment of our lives? That ineluctable universe within which we swim so beautifully day and night, one that, according to Seth, we also create—and all at once, no less! As Seth told us in Session 20, on January 23, 1964: “Time and space, dear friends, are both camouflage patterns, therefore the fact that the inner senses can conquer time and space is not, after all, so surprising. To the mind with its subconscious, and to the inner senses, there is no time or space....” If only we could really grasp consciously those innate qualities that we value so highly, yet take for granted! I think that my writing this introduction, then, is basically timeless behavior.

I add that none of those books stress reincarnation, or any claims that Jane or I (or both of us) had or have psychic relationships with any one of that celebrated trio. My wife simply knew how interested I was in those very creative individuals. I still am. I know I’m in good company with the many who have been and who are nourished by their works. One personal example: for many years I carried a beat-up old paperback edition of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience beside me on the front seat of my old Ford Taurus. Without conceit, I also feel that the works, the ideas, of those three are in their own ways reminiscent of the Seth material. (I don’t believe it would ever have occurred to Jane to make a statement like that!)

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.

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!

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.

And how did Jane and I meet? I too am a World War II veteran; after three years of service in the Air Force Transport Command I was discharged in 1942. I spent several years freelancing as a commercial artist in the Sayre, Pennsylvania area while living with my parents, Robert Sr. and Estelle (my father called her Stell). They were, I could see, getting older. I felt protective toward them; both of my younger brothers had left home, and one had married. I preferred the small-town life, but had about exhausted my professional options after doing medical illustrations for the local but well-known Robert Packer Hospital (some drawings won prizes in traveling exhibitions), working briefly in radio, painting signs, and so forth. Then I went back to doing comic-book art by mail for various New York City publishers. Finally I decided to return to the city indefinitely to go into advertising illustration, a field that paid much better. I told myself that I had to get back into the world out there.

Pardon me for using the phrase every so often, but as the years passed and after her two very brief stays in Elmira’s St. Joseph’s hospital, Jane finally came to be deeply skeptical of the value of conventional medical help. It hadn’t helped when it was offered. The connections involving her mother’s bedridden condition and her tempestuous temper, including her suicide attempts, both faked and real, troubles with a succession of housekeepers, the lack of a father, the almost two years she spent in a Catholic orphanage while Marie was hospitalized, the death of her beloved grandfather, the whole strained atmosphere within which the gifted and impressionable child was growing, as well as her conflicts with church dogma and personalities, had, all together, powerful effects indeed. Neighbors tried to help. One gifted Jane with a male dog—a Sheltie—from the city pound. Jane named that loving young creature Mischa, and he was to offer her great comfort for years, just as he did to me when later we met. And I learned that the symptoms were not only a possibility that was native within my wife, but were to become corrosively alive within her all of those years later. Jane took me to meet her mother in the old double house on Middle Avenue three times. The first time, Marie cursed me from her bed; the next two times she ignored me.

Within a few weeks Ed Robbins’ and my labors on the Mike Hammer detective strip came to an end due to policy differences with the syndicate distributing the feature. Both of us ended up out of work. I never did get to settle down in my own place in Schuylerville! A “coincidence,” of course, that my work for Ed ended at the same time Jane told him that she and Walt had amicably agreed to part. Ed talked about moving with his family to New Paltz, a small community about 110 miles south, near the Hudson River; he might find commercial work there with a friend. I thought of returning to my parents’ home in Sayre, and then going on to New York City as I’d originally planned to do before receiving that life-changing call from Ed.

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.

My father died in a rest home in 1971, my mother in 1973. Both were buried in the family plot in Tunkhannock. Without judgment or rancor I note that my parents never seemed to have the slightest interest in Jane’s work (although they loved her dearly), while taking my own abilities for granted as they had done all of my life. It was easy to look at signs and commercial art and paintings; they only knew that Jane wrote poetry and fiction, but never asked to read any of her work any more than we offered it to them.

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.)

For whatever reasons, she had resolved along the way to do her own thing in her own way—with two exceptions. She went to Andy Colucci, a dentist (and friend) who had his office around the corner from where we lived on West Water Street for routine cleaning (she had perfect teeth); and on rare occasions one or both of us visited Sam Levine, a doctor who had his office on the ground floor of his building next-door to 458. We’d see him for an inoculation, say, or treatment for a cold. Did Doctor Sam ever hear Seth’s booming voice in the summertime, when windows were open, or the uproarious racket made by the members of Jane’s ESP class on Tuesday nights? Yes he did, he told Jane, but he didn’t understand what was going on—only that there were many extra cars parked in the neighborhood on Tuesday nights. And Jane wasn’t about to explain: “Hi, Sam. Hey, I’m speaking in a trance state for this nonphysical entity called Seth—a guy I knew in Denmark three hundred years ago. I wonder if you can help me deal with some of my symptoms, as I call them. They might be connected with my psychic work…” Not a chance! Doctor Sam was a very kind but reserved Jewish doctor who helped many people on a daily basis. Yet I do think that even if he hadn’t accepted Jane’s mediumship per se, still he would have recognized it as being a portion of her psyche.

Shortly before they were to leave Yale, Jim Serra had e-mailed Laurel and me from New Haven to confirm his and his friends’ visit. The members also had plans for visits in upper New York State and in Maine before heading back to Texas. Laurel and I always find such infrequent meetings very evocative—unique signs of the reach of Jane’s work to a variety of individuals, each with his or her own creative and intuitional skills. This is both humbling and worthwhile, that Jane’s love and inspiration has helped so many others. And still does.

I showed our guests the portrait of Seth that I had painted from my vision in 1968, as well as my paintings of Jane both before and after her death. Some of the latter were from visions, some simply from my memory of her and what she was trying to tell me or from what I was trying to understand. I also showed our visitors several of my portraits from my own past lives, both male and female, that Seth had mentioned long ago, or that I’d tuned into through dreams. The points I stressed to the group mainly concerned my basically unconventional interests. I do some abstract art. Beyond an occasional foray, however, I no longer have an abiding interest in simple literal portraits or still-life or landscape images per se. But then, I asked, what more literal odyssey would there be than to investigate one’s own past lives, male and female? It took me a while to start thinking that way after Jane began speaking for Seth. The subject matter is endless, free of time and age and style in unique ways. And here again, I envision publishing a portfolio of my art, with the necessary text. I see Jane’s and my art as reinforcing the Seth material in quite original ways.

Actually, outside of our own small group of friends, including ESP class members, plus the well-received articles Peg Gallagher had written for the Elmira Star-Gazette, Jane and I hadn’t stirred ourselves to become known in Elmira, even after the Seth books had begun to sell. In our own creative ways we had been loners, (as I still am) basically; our passions had been to focus on what we could learn both for ourselves and others in the long term, and especially through publishing to reach a larger audience. This became even more so for us as Jane gradually became more restricted physically because of her symptoms.

We quickly made friends with the family across the road. Joseph and Margaret Bumbalo had three children, all living away from home. The youngest, John, who visited his parents occasionally, was attracted by the ideas in Jane’s work. (Now that was a coincidence!) He had, and still has, no doubt, a most powerful and moving baritone voice. He was also restless. When we met, John had little interest in an operatic career, as far as I recall, yet had taken professional singing lessons and given auditions. When he crossed the road to visit I would encourage him to sing a bit for us a cappella. The few brief times he did so I thrilled to the power and quality of his voice; I could feel it surging within me, as could Jane. John’s masculine power, while different from Jane’s Seth voice at its masculine strongest, represented the only time I’ve personally heard a voice that could match Seth’s voice at its best. Both voices could make my ears ring, conjuring up deep-seated wordless emotions that usually lay unsuspected within the psyche. Very revealing, Jane and John.

What had puzzled us both from the time of the episode was that Jim, Winter, Theresa and I, standing only two car lengths away from the two women, hadn’t become aware of the episode even if we hadn’t been staring in its general direction.