“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

My goal, then, has come to be the publishing of all of Jane’s work, or at least as much of it as I can, including not only the Seth material but her poetry and fiction and notes and journals—to finally be able to offer it as a great whole for study in what we call the “future.” For if all of a person’s lifework isn’t known, how can its true worth in all of its human complexity ultimately be known? Sometimes I think I’m a slow learner: It took me a while to realize, for example, that the responses to the Seth material by mail and in person—and now electronically—are actually myriad extensions of that work, showing in all of their varieties the questions and answers it’s raised and the beneficial effects it’s had on the many who have communicated since Jane held her first real session on December 2, 1963—and on those who still do. The mail in any form is great! Seldom does a day go by that I don’t answer letters. I’m glad to do it, even when I fall far behind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.