“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Yet every so often in this series I’ll be including sessions that are also of more outgoing subject matter—more like the sessions in Jane’s published Seth books. Later volumes of The Personal Sessions will also include a whole book that Jane delivered for me on the great l7th-Century Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. This book has never been published. It’s not a Seth book, but one of the three “world view” books from highly creative people in the arts that Jane tuned into on her own as gifts for me. The other two are The World View of Paul Cézanne (1977), and The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James (1978). When we get to the Rembrandt material in this series I’ll offer my interpretation of Jane’s very interesting world-view material.

In fact, he had to dig the board out of his cluttered attic to give to us. Yet he had initially investigated the topic, and after Idea Construction his gift sent us on our way in no uncertain terms. We didn’t even have to order a board!

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.

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.

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.

During this time also Jane’s mother, Marie, lost her home in Saratoga Springs, NY, and was placed in a state-run nursing home in nearby Middle Grove. Through the mail mother and daughter patched up their volatile relationship enough to begin exchanging letters fairly regularly. Jane never told Marie about the Seth material, or her symptoms. Marie even accepted me as her daughter’s husband. The two gave each other Christmas gifts. Jane sent her mother nightwear and stationery and other small useful presents. Marie always sent her daughter sweaters that she had knitted with great difficulty because of her misshapen fingers; invariably the garments were too large. Seth suggested that Jane not wear them in any case because of the roiled emotions that had existed between the two almost from Jane’s birth; gifts from the mother could still carry those feelings. Mother and daughter were to never meet again: Marie died shortly before 1975. By then it wasn’t easy for Jane to travel, and we didn’t make the approximately 400-mile roundtrip to attend the funeral. Later the nursing home was closed by the state. A mutual friend sent us photographs of the big old red-brick building, three stories high, shuttered and dark and deserted among the trees and in the snow.

I do want to record that while we took great comfort in receiving the mail, we also came to receive through it an additional and totally unexpected gift—one that literally we would never have asked for even if we had thought of it. Maude Cardwell, an older Seth reader in Austin, Texas, had for several years been publishing a modest monthly journal on the Seth material that she called Reality Change. When I wrote her about Jane’s latest hospitalization Maude, without mentioning her idea to me, suggested to her readers that donations would help Jane and me cope with our hospital bills. I would have never had the nerve to make such a statement. St. Joe’s, as we called the hospital, had never dunned us for money in the past, and wasn’t doing so now. Our considerable daily charges were mounting, but we had emotionally pushed their import into the background. I was able to make modest payments out of royalty income I had been saving, but this was difficult to keep up because most of that money was paid to us but twice a year. Imagine, then, our great surprise when the readers of Reality Change began to contribute: small checks; medium checks; the occasional larger check. I have every one of those letters and my heartfelt answers in a separate file that I plan to add as a unit to the collection of Jane’s and my work in the archives of Yale University Library.

When Jane entered the hospital for the last 21 months of her life, I could run all I wanted to. I usually spent the morning typing the session she had delivered the afternoon before for The Way Toward Health, answering mail, running, and running errands. I went to her room at noon and stayed until the evening, seven days a week, every week. I still remember asking myself as I trotted along on my 65th birthday on June 20: “Should I still be doing this?” My answer was yes, for that action, free of any other personal responsibility, helped me stay connected with the outside world in my own way. Jane died later that year. John Bumbalo did me an enormous favor in the hours following Jane’s death. When I came home from the hospital for the last time in a year and 9 months, John went to Jane’s room 330 and very carefully gathered up all of the belongings and artifacts we had accumulated there and brought them to me in 1730: my paintings and drawings, the letters from readers that I had put up on the walls (the hospital never complained), the session notebooks for The Way Toward Health, our books and magazines and newspapers and clothes, the flowers and other gifts from readers and from some of the nurses—all of those things that seem to accumulate almost by themselves as one seeks to create a home wherever that may be.