“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.

I’m married now to a very beautiful, intelligent and much younger lady who in her own unique ways offers me invaluable love, assistance, and reinforcement. I often feel that Laurel Lee Davies, a native of Iowa who came to me from California on August 23, 1985, 11 months after Jane’s death, helped transform me. No coincidence, that! After we had corresponded for a while I called Laurel on February 2, 1985. We met at the hill house in Elmira on August 25 of that year. From the very beginning our relationship seemed perfectly natural, as though we had always known each other. (We feel reincarnational relationships but have yet to explore them.) Laurel helped revitalize me; our years together have been full and creative and productive—and yes, at times controversial. But always she has helped me, just as, I trust, I have helped her. I’m still amazed by the challenges two human beings can create and resolve for themselves within the inconceivable beauty and mystery of All That Is. Each one of us springs into creativity while All That Is gives us the supreme privilege of doing so—and thus, I feel, constantly surprises itself.

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!

I’m also still embarrassed to contemplate the merciless racket Jane, Seth, and their students made after class began in 1966. The floors and ceilings of the old house were not soundproof. And in retrospect I’m apologetic and grateful that during our whole tenure there not one tenant ever complained to our landlord, Jimmy Spaziani, about the noise we subjected that captive audience to once a week for those nine class years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She began the sessions on December 2, 1963 and published The Seth Material in 1970. Before that welcome event, however, we had held 510 sessions over five years and two months, mainly for ourselves as we sought to understand and let develop her most unusual abilities as she spoke for and wrote about Seth, with all that such creatively unorthodox behavior implied. We never asked others in the field to help us play “the psychic game,” as we understood it from our reading. We just wanted to do our own thing. Mischa died, and I buried him in a flower bed in back of 458, as we called the house; we were left with our two cats. Those 510 sessions have now been published in nine volumes by Rick Stack of New Awareness Network, Inc. (See that last volume for my drawing of Mischa.) It took a while after the publication of The Seth Material for the first seemingly innocuous signs of conflict within Jane’s psyche—the symptoms—to appear.

I do admit that in recent years I’ve wondered more and more why artists don’t deal with at least their own past-life images. Surely these would be as original as any conventional self-portrait. Surely the artist could have, would have, insights into such existences but for a number of reasons—fear of ridicule, for example—choose not to investigate them. Especially in public ways! Yet artists are supposed to be uninhibited to express their feelings and knowledge. An incredibly rich and very nearly untapped, psychic and psychological field lies open for exploration, I think, waiting, waiting. I also believe that opening up past-life fields would enrich us all. In my naiveté I can see a whole genre of art growing. My own projected portfolio of art will include at least several past-life images of me. I’ve already painted them (but can always add more). Recently I finished a past-life portrait from my vision of a friend Jane and I had known years ago. Jim hasn’t seen it; we lost touch with him before moving to the hill house in 1975. Why did that past-life image of him come to me in 2002? I painted my image of Jim with tiny crosses in the pupils of his eyes, and with his eyes themselves brimming with tears. I wrote: “Always very religious in his lives, Jim cried with compassion for his fellow human beings.” The resultant oil is one of my best.

At the end of the first day of the group’s most interesting visit. Richie and Yvette left to return to Connecticut. Jim and Debbie and Winter and Theresa left for the Holiday Inn in Elmira, New York, 15 miles across the Pennsylvania border. At the Inn in 1997 and 1999 Laurel and I had been guests at well-attended Seth conferences organized by Lynda Dahl and Stan Ulkowski. Our rich memories of those gatherings are nourished each time we drive past the Inn on our way to the hill house. We met our guests at the Inn the next morning, and the six of us drove in our three cars to a nearby country restaurant for breakfast. Then, with Laurel driving and our friends’ cars following, we traveled up a steep and winding hill just outside the city to not only a fine view but to Quarry Farm, an old-fashioned but large and elegant wooden homestead where Mark Twain had done some of his finest writing. No admittance, private property, a sign proclaimed, so we stood in the driveway just off the road to study the farm and its open and peaceful setting. Then back down into the city and to the campus of Elmira College. Jane had lectured to a class in creative writing at the college after the publication of Seth Speaks in 1972.There on the school’s green sward stood the small many-windowed gazebo that Mark Twain had worked in during his summers at the farm; it had been relocated to the college long ago. Not surprisingly it was locked, but still easy to inspect—and also to just accept as the people of Elmira and those in the college went about their daily activities. Mark Twain had been one of Jane’s favorite writers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Rob, do you think the community—Elmira—has any idea of the historical significance of this house, as far as Jane’s work goes?”

The last stop in our group’s little tour was to visit the hill house. 1730 Pinnacle Road sits on a corner lot up a modest hill on the western outskirts of Elmira. Jane and I fell for it the first time we saw it. It’s a one-story dark-green-painted dwelling with a big stone fireplace, and has a screened-in side porch and a one-car garage in back. The woods continuing on up the hill begin only 50 feet from the garage. The setting had—and has—privacy without being isolated from other homes not far away and it had plenty of room for our few possessions and work projects. That was a real treat to us.

Often I think of the routines Jane and I settled into upon moving into 1730 in 1975. She was 46; I was 56. Now it seems that all of those years to follow passed in a flash. Routines, yes, but also ever-changing ones that still revolved around the simple elements of the work we loved and carried out amid the unexpected freedoms of living so much closer to the environment we had always taken for granted: the writing and painting, the sessions and mail, the publishing of books, the visits of friends and fans, some even from Europe. The hill house was the first property either one of us had ever owned, yet even within that loving context Jane gradually had more and more trouble walking even while the Seth material continued to grow in reach and flexibility, to attract a wider and wider audience. We saw deer in the back yard and put feed out for them and the birds. (The deer went into hiding during the hunting seasons.)

Another part of my routine at 1730, a somewhat selfish one I saw in retrospect, involved first walking and then running late at night. I’d always been active in sports, and later in dancing with Jane, but as her symptoms slowly deepened I became more and more reluctant to leave her alone except when I had full or part-time jobs. By the time we bought 1730 we could exist without my outside income for the most part as we concentrated on the Seth material. I had my chance, I told Jane: on other than session nights I was free to leave the house. I started out walking, but soon my nighttime excursions turned into running on those hilly streets in our neighborhood. Jane was reluctant to see me go out late at night, but I reassured her that she would be all right in the house and that I would be all right outside of it—and each one of us always was. My solitary treks became most enjoyable, no matter the time of year. I came to know intimately all of the dead-end streets opening off the main road, Coleman Avenue, like steps in a ladder that led up the hill to Pinnacle Road. I encountered wildlife on those streets. I told Jane that my record was six deer at one time. I stopped moving; they stopped; each side stared at the other in the porch light from a house across the street....

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.

Jane and I lived in the hill house while she had her greatest initial successes with publishing the Seth material, and before she went into the hospital for good on April 20, 1983. Of course 1730 is still a large part of my life, as it is of Laurel’s, even while we use it for storage of all of the treasures it still contains: many of my paintings, files stuffed with records that are destined for the collection at Yale University Library, Laurel’s books and mine, and her records and possessions—all of those intimate signs of life that now seem suspended in our creations of space/time. Laurel came to live with me there on August 23, 1985, 11 months after Jane’s death. And may I add that she wasn’t enamored of my late-night running either. Now, at 83, I walk or run just about every day over the streets I knew so well as a child—only I do it in the daytime. It’s a treat, a privilege, to be able to do it each day. Then I do some painting. I have evenings free to answer mail and write and proofread books like this one. While I still feel the pull of all of those secret nighttimes out of 1730....

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.

Then a strange little challenge began to develop. There were two cars lined up in the driveway. Without intending to, Laurel and Debbie became separated from the rest of us as they stood in back of the car nearest the road, while Winter, Jim, Theresa and I were clustered near the front of the other car as it was pointed toward the house. The four of us were so busy talking that we actually missed the little drama that followed: Laurel briefly mentioned it to me right after it took place—telling me that a very large bird, a hawk or an eagle, had flown from low over the house seemingly right toward her and Debbie before zooming back up to perch high in a tree in the backyard of the house across the road. Amid the other conversations going on I didn’t really appreciate what the two women had experienced until Laurel went into detail about it the next day. By then we were back in Sayre by ourselves as we sought to understand the meaning or message that was involved.

First, though, as the afternoon began to lengthen our guests left us at the end of their most delightful collective visit. Laurel and I had thoroughly enjoyed meeting them; we’d badly needed a break from our endless routines of work, even if those were mostly creative. There were handshakes and thank-yous and hugs all around. Jim and Debbie, and Theresa and Winter wanted to visit the wine country of upstate New York, and then continue their vacation in Maine before finally heading back west and home. Laurel and I were left standing alone in 1730’s driveway. But not for long. She hadn’t brought birdseed along as she usually does to scatter around the house, so down the hill we went to the little store at the intersection, then back up to the silent and shuttered house....

That night in Sayre, and the next day, Laurel mentioned her near encounter with the hawk or eagle several times before we finally got down to really discussing what had happened at 1730. I drew a crude map of the house and its grounds as seen from above. The front of the house, facing Pinnacle Road, cannot be seen from where all of us were standing in the driveway to the side and in back of it. On the map Laurel showed me how the bird had suddenly zoomed into view low over the house from Pinnacle Road, and then flown even lower toward the two women near the back of the second car in the driveway. Laurel exclaimed now about the bird’s enormous wingspan as it had seemed to fly right at her. It had made no sound except for the rush of air through its wings. Obviously my wife hadn’t been prepared for its seemingly friendly behavior.

On this October day last fall, as we stood in Jane and Rob’s driveway, (now my driveway also) at Pinnacle Road, Rob and most of the group started looking around the front of the house. I stood talking at the entrance of our driveway with a writer in the group.

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!

At the hill house Jane and I used to see such birds, but soaring and circling high above, perhaps with their superb vision searching for small birds and animals. We never saw one behave as Laurel described. A sign of a message from the universe, she said! I thought of trying to paint a portrait of a hawk or an eagle. I thought of its enormous beauty and energy, the creative energy that sustains us all, in whatever form we choose to create and to live by and with. Thank you, Laurel and Jane and 458 and 1730 and our guests, for reminding me of that as I bring this introduction to The Personal Sessions to an end—even while I feel its persistent challenge to grow into a book of its own. Maybe someday...?