“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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 also feel that now, years later in earthly time, Jane and Seth are free of each other yet more closely knit than ever before. And me? Yes, I chose to be creatively involved (as I still am, obviously) for my own intuitive reasons—not only as an intensely interested observer and recorder, but as an artist too. Much of my art is rooted in the Seth material, in ways I couldn’t have anticipated before Jane and I began our work together. Seth once said that without my steadying influence Jane may never have developed the sessions as we know them. That may be true, but I’m also sure that she would have expressed her innate creativity in other surely literary ways—and maybe in psychic ways, too! Why not? Look at her The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. But those more acceptable ways, like her “regular” essays but like her poetry most of all, were the ones she had worked in and with from a very early age.

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.

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.