“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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!

At the board, my wife clumsily reached a personality named Frank Watts, an American schoolteacher who told us he’d died in 1931. He gave us very brief, halting and sometimes disconnected answers during our first three board sessions. Yet in that third session Frank Watts told us that Jane had “Too much aggression.” That she had been a “Medium.” in a previous life, that her present “Timidity has roots of rage.” from “Previous hates unresolved.” that she “Must conquer now.” When I asked Frank Watts about those unresolved hates, he replied “No information direct permitted.”

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!

Seth, very briefly and with his underlining in Session 54 on May 18, 1964: “I could not tell you in the beginning in so many words that Ruburt (Jane) is myself, because you would have leaped to the conclusion that I was Ruburt’s subconscious mind, and this is not so. When you understand the construction of entities, then you will understand how this can be so. Ruburt is not myself now, in his present life; he is nevertheless an extension and materialization of the Seth that I was at one time. Nothing remains unchanging, personalities and entities least of all...I realize this is somewhat difficult, but...Ruburt is now the result of the Seth that I once was, for I have changed since then.”

Instead, I think Seth knew that even though he was—and I’m sure still is—in certain senses a portion of Jane’s psyche, brilliant counterpart that he was and is, he too had in his own way and for his own reasons desires to contend with Jane’s chosen background this time, with her frightened and restricted upbringing and with his obvious advantage of a much more detailed overall knowledge of the life experiences—past, present, and future—involving the three of us. Yet Jane and I didn’t ask him to predict for us in national or global terms. Nor for that matter did it occur to us, uninformed though we probably were, to ask about predictions or even “just” the probabilities concerning our own physical lives, let alone our physical deaths. Not that we would have received any answers! All Seth ever told us was that we were in our last physical incarnations. Why didn’t we push him for more specific answers? He’d have certainly said something, since he was never at a loss for words!

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 strong saving grace in all of the personal and household turmoil she lived in, Jane told me often, was her relationship with her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo, her “Little Daddy,” as she called him because of his diminutive size. Even as a youngster she had been well aware that she felt psychically connected to him. Joseph Burdo had become estranged from his wife, Minnie Finn, long ago. He was a man of few words, yet he nurtured in his granddaughter a love of nature that she was to cherish for the rest of her life. In Appendix 1, Volume 1 of The “Unknown” Reality, published in 1977, I partially quote Seth as saying that Joseph Burdo was “Part of a very strong entity. However, extremely inarticulate in his last life, due to an inability to synthesize gains in past lives… That is, in his feeling of unity with All That Is, he excluded other human beings....” He lived alone in rented rooms and worked at various jobs in town; he was a doorman, a watchman. He drank and gambled at the local casinos and played the horses at Saratoga Springs’ famous racetrack. He took Jane on walks in the nearby woods. “When he spoke of the wind,” Seth remarked, “she felt like the wind, as any child will unselfconsciously identify with the elements.” He died in 1949 at 68, when Jane was 20 years old.

A note about how the “past, present and future” evolved and combined in an unexpected way within Seth’s concept of simultaneous time. Jane divorced Walter Zeh in 1954, and published Seth Speaks in 1972 and Personal Reality in 1974. She died in 1984. During all of that time we had no communication with Walt, as might be expected, although we often talked about him and wished him well. Yet a year or so after Jane’s death Walt wrote to me, and we began a most interesting correspondence although we were never to meet. Walt gave me background information about Jane’s history, and his own, and the welcome news that he had married again and fathered several children. For many years he worked for the New York State government in Albany. His passion was railroading, and after his retirement he and his wife traveled extensively by rail.

Walt passed along his discovery of the Seth material to his family. Our correspondence eventually faltered, then ceased. Finally, I received news of his death from one of his sons. He too had become interested in Jane’s work, and had many questions. I replied, but heard no more from the Zeh family. I think about them often.

I packed my suitcase and art materials the day before I was to leave Sayre. At suppertime that night I received a telephone call from Ed Robbins, an old friend I’d gone to art school with in Brooklyn, New York before World War II. The results flowing from that call, which was so of-the-moment, were to change my life forever—and Jane’s too! Ed offered me a job as an artist in his upstate hometown of Schuylerville, some 11 miles east of Saratoga Springs and on the Hudson River. He was writing and drawing the Mike Hammer daily and Sunday comic strips for his friend, Mickey Spillane, and was having trouble meeting those remorseless weekly deadlines for the syndicate that distributed the feature to newspapers coast to coast. Ed knew I’d done comic-book work: would I be interested in helping him get his strips to the syndicate on time? The pay would be good. I could live with him and his wife Ella and their children until I found a place for myself if our arrangement worked out.

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.

Ed wanted to find number 92, the old double house that Jane had described to him as being her childhood home. We had crawled halfway along the avenue, between its dim corner streetlights, when my car’s headlights brushed over a shadowy feminine figure walking in our direction. Indeed, I was driving past the lady when Ed, looking back, exclaimed: “Hey, wait, Bob—that’s her! That’s Jane right there now. Pull over—” He was lowering his side window even as he spoke. Yes, it was Jane Zeh, expressing surprise in a clear musical voice at such a “chance” meeting as she came even with the car. I could see only part of her silhouette as Ed introduced us and told her I’d be working for him. Jane didn’t have a license to drive. She said that if she happened to be in Schuylerville during the day she’d stop in at Ed’s studio in town and say hello. (She did, but several weeks later.) Right then, she told us she was on her way to see her bedridden mother, Marie, as she often did at that time of night. She pointed out number 92, a few doors ahead of us. I said something innocuous to the effect that I looked forward to meeting her and her husband next Saturday night.

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.

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.

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.

And guess what: I finally understood as Jane’s symptoms began to slowly grow that her choices were her right, and stopped my innuendos that it was perfectly all right for her to be open to outside help—so why wasn’t she? Seth was way ahead of me. I don’t recall that worthy ever suggesting to my wife outright that she seek medical help, let alone insisting that she do so. Was this because Jane wouldn’t allow him to say that, even if he wanted to? As noted, at times I’d felt that that was the case. It’s easy to proclaim that we human beings live short of our potentials in those terms—for if such potentials didn’t exist, how could we sense or aspire to them? But I’m hardly being original when I insist that each life is so intensely real that it seems most difficult to truly believe that we can have it any other way—let alone have more than one! Our challenges in this physical/nonphysical existence reign supreme, regardless of other possible long-term influences like reincarnation or time travel, for example. Or—yes—even religion: a subject I would like to explore in depth if ever I can create the several years of camouflage time necessary to do so. So even if Seth did help, still Jane chose to live her own life within the face and force of her own very creative present personality. Seth did offer insights, excellent ones of certain very creative depths that we more than welcomed, while all the time being quite aware, I think, that the beautiful young woman through whom he spoke—who let him speak—had her own agenda at the same time. And even though we agreed with Seth’s reincarnational material involving the three of us, and our families, still it was also intensely personal for my wife in this life that she go her own way.

The checks kept arriving as Jane’s health very slowly cotinued to deteriorate even with all of our creative activities in 330. As the months passed I became more and more consciously caught up in the signs of her approaching physical death. See the final sessions and notes in The Way Toward Health, which I published in 1997, 13 years after her passing. Questions? There was no end to them, and there still isn’t. Like, why had I stayed way later than usual on the night of her death—so late that I fell asleep in my chair beside her bed after she had fallen asleep? Usually I left 330 before 10 PM. When at last I startled awake, Jane had died, at an estimated 2:08 AM on Wednesday, September 5, 1984. How did my dear wife react, feel, at the moment of her death? In the minute AFTER her death? How did Seth respond in those same fleeting intervals? How did the two of them greet each other, and perhaps join? Had he spoken with me after those precious first moments, could Seth have given me information that Jane, for whatever reasons, hadn’t wanted us to acquire from or through him? Did Jane, did Seth, watch me make the two pen-and-ink drawings of my beautiful wife as she lay so quietly in her bed, at peace at last? (I still plan to do paintings based on that art.)

A month later, in Session l68 on July 7, he did tell me that the work was an excellent likeness; Jane had liked it from the day I began working on it. And why hadn’t I ever painted the two of them together? I could even insert myself into the art, since I’m the third member of the triumvirate. In short, I believe there’s no end to our abilities in whatever reality we choose to create and explore.

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.

I converted this image of Seth from the full-color, nearly life-size portrait I painted of him in oil from my vision in 1968. I show him from the waist up as he beckons to the viewer—Rob.

Finally, then: I was working on this introduction late in October 2002 when Laurel and I were visited by five members of the Houston, Texas, Seth group: Winter Calvert, Theresa Smith, Jim and Debbie Serra, and Yvette Silva. I had corresponded with a few members of the group, and Jim and his wife had visited me some time ago. The five were accompanied by Richie Kendall; he’s an old friend from the days of Jane’s ESP class—one of the New York City boys, as Jane used to fondly refer to that group. Richie had also visited Laurel and me twice last summer with Mary Dillman from his new residence in Westport, Connecticut.

While we were surveying the house I saw a young black man step off the front porch and stroll out to the sidewalk. He didn’t turn to walk up or down the street, however, as one might expect, but casually stood there and turned to look at our group a few times as we talked and took pictures. Evidently we’d bothered at least one tenant after all, to the point of sending a sibling, say, to try to see what we might be up to, if anything. Perhaps deciding that we were no threat, our observer sauntered back into the house. I never did see anyone peeking out at us, though.

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.

John “settled down” eventually; he lives with his wife and children in Seattle, Washington. I saw him once several years later when he visited his mother. He was immensely proud to show me his very young first son. His mother Margaret retired to Florida after the death of her husband Joe. We still keep in touch. I’ll always treasure her exceptional kindnesses to me during Jane’s long and final hospital stay.

Once our three cars were parked in or near 1730’s driveway, Debbie Serra helped me unload the overstuffed roadside mailbox and carry the pile to my SUV. As we milled about the side porch and garage area and began talking about 1730, Jim politely asked if he and the other three guests could see the inside of it. Laurel just as politely declined. The cozy house that Jane and I had loved so much looked dark and forlorn. The door and window shades were drawn. The house needed painting. The porch’s screen door was wired shut in a crude way that wouldn’t keep anyone out.

As we stood talking another visitor dropped by also, rather literally, as a hawk or young golden eagle flew in! He or she appeared flying out of the Southwest, soaring down over the top of our house and flew right up to Deb and me to say hello! It was incredible to me as it took place, as I have never met a flying hawk or eagle face to face before. I have for many years had specific positive symbolic-seeming events with flying creatures and this seemed to be another one. Deb felt the same way. The hawk or eagle was completely in control in his or her flight, Deb and I were at no time in danger, but he or she flew in and actually looked at us almost face to face and then showed us a full in-flight wing span a meter wide (three feet or more) as he or she turned up the angle of flight and soared back up again, just over our heads. The creature flew across the road, soaring up into the branches of a tall tree, where it stopped and perched, and looked at us. Deb and I stood looking at the bird that sat with its profile to us—like a new friend who had flown in! We continued talking and were not looking at the bird when it flew away; we did not see where it disappeared to.

Perhaps he or she was a magical symbol of the powerful natural universe coming to visit, in the driveway of our Pinnacle Road house, along with individuals from the television industry, the power industry, the arts and financial worlds. At the same moment a large hawk or small eagle decides to drop by and say hello!

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.”