“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In reviewing them, I’m very pleased to discover that these sessions are as fresh, as creative and perceptive, as they ever were. Talk about the elasticity of “time,” as Seth often did! How much do we consciously know, or think we know, about that ultimately mysterious quality within which we construct our universe, our planet, the most minute portion of each one of us, mental or physical, during each moment of our lives? That ineluctable universe within which we swim so beautifully day and night, one that, according to Seth, we also create—and all at once, no less! As Seth told us in Session 20, on January 23, 1964: “Time and space, dear friends, are both camouflage patterns, therefore the fact that the inner senses can conquer time and space is not, after all, so surprising. To the mind with its subconscious, and to the inner senses, there is no time or space....” If only we could really grasp consciously those innate qualities that we value so highly, yet take for granted! I think that my writing this introduction, then, is basically timeless behavior.

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.

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.)

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.

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!