“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Very soon after that initial revelation, Jane and I began the actual sessions when we sat with a Ouija board on December 2, 1963. See Volume 1 of The Early Sessions. Hardly a “coincidence,” that psychic and psychological progression, from an easy-to-use popular device to something much more personal and encompassing like idea construction. Yet the board had played its part. One can even say that Jane’s basic intuitive knowledge of idea construction led us to use the board in the first place.

Jane had read about the Ouija board and expressed casual interest in it, but hadn’t tried to obtain one; nor was there a local supplier. What conscious and unconscious communications, we were to wonder, had led her to mention the board to Jimmy? What kind of a “coincidence” was that, anyhow? Out of all of the apartments for rent in Elmira, why had Jane chosen that one? She had found the apartment. She came to Elmira with me after I’d begun working for the greeting-card company, Artistic, to look for a place for us so we could move from Sayre and save the time and expense of commuting 30 miles a day, five days a week. She found the empty apartment 5 at 458 on her first day of looking. When I picked her up after leaving work she directed me to the apartment, and that was that. Jimmy had lost interest in psychic phenomena long ago.

Would we have done just that on our own? How else might the sessions have begun—would Jane’s Idea Construction have led us into them at all as we came to know them? How far back into camouflage time should one try to trace such connections?

Of the two of us I was supposed to be the artist in the conventional sense, yet I’d always felt that I couldn’t rival Jane’s amazingly simple but brilliantly colored art that was so true to her innate psychic knowledge—while seemingly ignoring it! But she didn’t ignore it at all, I learned along the way, for she created and explored a spontaneous and innocent reality that freed her from all other concerns. Her art contained our origins, I felt, by strongly calling attention to her obviously creative and intuitive knowledge. She painted a tree rising out of the earth with brilliantly colored apples, for example. It was, after all, an epitome of what our reality has led us to create and enjoy. What could be better? She wasn’t bound by the mundane rules of perspective, with its everyday limits that most of us never surmount or subsume: she created her deceptively childish world each time she painted. I could go on and on. Jane’s work is not large-scale by any means. One of my goals is to see her art, all of it, reproduced in color in 81/2” x 11” portfolio style at a modest price. Susan Ray of Moment Point Press used three of Jane’s paintings as cover art for her books; God of Jane, Adventures in Consciousness, and Psychic Politics.

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.

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....