“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Thus, I opened up several years ago to ask Rick to publish the nine volumes of The Early Sessions through his New Awareness Network, Inc. And now, I open up even more to his publication of The Personal Sessions series. As this group of sessions slowly accumulated, often as “deleted” or unpublished portions of “regular” sessions, Jane and I took it for granted that since they were personal they would stay that way. Every session is obviously personal, since Jane delivered them all, but now I’m encouraging the overall intimacy of these personal sessions to seek their own intimate freedom—and of course I know that doing this will not only help others, but me too.

It’s easy to note in retrospect that such remarks were clues, clear indications or projections of at least possible troubles that we needed to explore in depth, but the whole affair with the board was so new to us that in our inexperience we felt no urgency to at least try to do so. We had no experience to go upon.

The camouflage days pass with blessed speed as Laurel and I savor them in all of their complexities. Our journey together continues with new insights, new challenges, new understandings. We were married on December 31, 1999. Thank you, Laurel. I love you.

This seems obvious in retrospect. Her multitudinous abilities also showed in the ESP classes she held from 1966 through 1975, with a few informal meetings after that. When I finish these volumes of personal sessions I’ll be publishing with Rick Stack’s New Awareness Network the transcripts of many of those always hilarious, incredibly active, crowded and loud meetings: full of Seth sessions, member dialogues and repartees and questions that erupted in those weekly classes that Jane held in our apartment’s small living room. I didn’t attend most of them. Usually on class night, Tuesday, I was secluded in my studio at the back of our second-floor apartment, typing from my notes the session Jane had held for the two of us the night before; then I’d be caught up for the Wednesday-night session to come.

The session is crammed with fascinating material. See Volume 2 of The Early Sessions series of nine volumes, published by New Awareness Network, Inc.

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.

A year later Jane made the naive mistake of seeking comfort in a marriage to a new friend, Walter Zeh, who was having his own difficult life with just one parent. By then both were attending Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs. Jane was on a liberal arts scholarship awarded to her because of her gifts and work in writing; her husband, a World War II veteran, qualified under a government program and majored in philosophy. Skidmore suspended Jane’s scholarship at the end of her third year because she’d attended an all-night party with three professors and three other students; along with discussions of philosophy there had been drinking and smoking, but very modestly on her part. Her marriage was in the process of breaking up when we met early in 1954. I made no judgments about that relationship. Walt and I got along well.

A note about how the “past, present and future” evolved and combined in an unexpected way within Seth’s concept of simultaneous time. Jane divorced Walter Zeh in 1954, and published Seth Speaks in 1972 and Personal Reality in 1974. She died in 1984. During all of that time we had no communication with Walt, as might be expected, although we often talked about him and wished him well. Yet a year or so after Jane’s death Walt wrote to me, and we began a most interesting correspondence although we were never to meet. Walt gave me background information about Jane’s history, and his own, and the welcome news that he had married again and fathered several children. For many years he worked for the New York State government in Albany. His passion was railroading, and after his retirement he and his wife traveled extensively by rail.

And how did Jane and I meet? I too am a World War II veteran; after three years of service in the Air Force Transport Command I was discharged in 1942. I spent several years freelancing as a commercial artist in the Sayre, Pennsylvania area while living with my parents, Robert Sr. and Estelle (my father called her Stell). They were, I could see, getting older. I felt protective toward them; both of my younger brothers had left home, and one had married. I preferred the small-town life, but had about exhausted my professional options after doing medical illustrations for the local but well-known Robert Packer Hospital (some drawings won prizes in traveling exhibitions), working briefly in radio, painting signs, and so forth. Then I went back to doing comic-book art by mail for various New York City publishers. Finally I decided to return to the city indefinitely to go into advertising illustration, a field that paid much better. I told myself that I had to get back into the world out there.

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.

Well, the pay wouldn’t be as good as I could earn in New York City, I explained to my parents, but my living expenses would be much lower. Besides, I’d be close enough to visit them often, so what could I lose? I could always go to the city. What I didn’t understand until later was that Ed’s seemingly innocent call had set into motion a series of events that one by one would magically fall into place and create a much larger, much longer and more penetrating overall experience. I wasn’t used to consciously thinking in such terms.

Ed told me that his car was in a garage for repairs. Tomorrow he was to take the bus from Schuylerville to mail his weekly set of strips to the syndicate via the faster service provided by the post office in Saratoga Springs. If I drove upstate, he suggested, I could meet him late in the day at the post office, and then we could go out to his place. Evening was approaching at the end of my 200-mile trip when we met. Now Ed had a new idea after we’d become reacquainted. I paraphrase all of his dialogue even though my memory is good: “Bob, there’s a couple you’ve got to meet—her name’s Jane Zeh and her husband is Walt. She writes poetry, did a column for The Saratogian. I think she’s got real ability. They have an apartment here in town, and her mother lives on Middle Avenue. I’d like to see the place where she grew up—it’s not far out of our way out of town...” Ed added that a few days later, on Saturday night, the Zehs were to join a gathering of friends at his and Ella’s home in Schuylerville.

February 2, 1954: I was so struck by Jane’s beauty that I asked her to pose for me soon after we met in Saratoga Springs, New York. She wasn’t to begin creating the Seth material per se until December 6, 1963.

Within a few weeks Ed Robbins’ and my labors on the Mike Hammer detective strip came to an end due to policy differences with the syndicate distributing the feature. Both of us ended up out of work. I never did get to settle down in my own place in Schuylerville! A “coincidence,” of course, that my work for Ed ended at the same time Jane told him that she and Walt had amicably agreed to part. Ed talked about moving with his family to New Paltz, a small community about 110 miles south, near the Hudson River; he might find commercial work there with a friend. I thought of returning to my parents’ home in Sayre, and then going on to New York City as I’d originally planned to do before receiving that life-changing call from Ed.

Getting a divorce in New York State was difficult in the 1950s, but easy to achieve in Florida. Jane’s father, Del, traveled with his trailer from Los Angeles to meet us in Daytona Beach, Florida; we followed him to Marathon, in the Florida Keys, where we lived with him and Mischa and Del’s Great Dane, Boo, in that wonderful climate while Jane put in the required few weeks of residency that Florida divorce law required. I found work painting signs, and prepared samples of advertising art to show art directors in New York City once we’d returned north. Besides writing for herself, Jane worked briefly as a cashier in a newly-opened food market; she left the job after a few days when the manager made advances to her. Her divorce was granted without being contested, the papers signed. Del paid the costs. We thanked him, said good-bye to him and Boo and headed north with Mischa in my ancient Cadillac. We hoped we had enough money to get to my parents’ home in Sayre, PA. We made it with only one flat tire on the way.

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.

If they chose to do so together, how did Jane and Seth explore the new reality they were committed to? Could I have briefly joined that reality, and perhaps recorded a few aspects of it in my own dream reality, aside from the afterdeath paintings of Jane that I was to produce over the next several years? What, I could ask, did Seth really think of the portrait I’d painted of him way back in June 1968? I had envisioned him as portly, middle-aged, and bald.

But even trying to take into account all that Jane accomplished, I know that while I proofread the galleys of The Personal Sessions as Rick Stack of New Awareness Network sends them to me volume by volume, I’ll still come across material that is new to me. Each discovery, large or small, will be a new truth. This has happened often as I’ve worked with the Seth books over the years. Readers have written describing similar experiences. I make no pretense of keeping in mind the contents of the more than l6,500 typewritten pages of the Seth material and notes. I only know and feel, that the material will help me and others, and I do appreciate the participation of each reader.

Finally, then: I was working on this introduction late in October 2002 when Laurel and I were visited by five members of the Houston, Texas, Seth group: Winter Calvert, Theresa Smith, Jim and Debbie Serra, and Yvette Silva. I had corresponded with a few members of the group, and Jim and his wife had visited me some time ago. The five were accompanied by Richie Kendall; he’s an old friend from the days of Jane’s ESP class—one of the New York City boys, as Jane used to fondly refer to that group. Richie had also visited Laurel and me twice last summer with Mary Dillman from his new residence in Westport, Connecticut.

Our guests, with others who didn’t make the trip to Sayre, had been visiting the collection of the Seth material in the archives of Yale University Library in New Haven, CT. The archives contain a complete copy of my original typed pages of the Seth material in its 46 three-ring binders; many editions of the Seth books and Jane’s “own” books in English and in translations; her published and unpublished novels; her journals and poetry; her notes and papers, and mine; various published Seth journals; treatises and websites on the Internet (some nice, some not so nice); plus other relevant, indeed very evocative material like the reader correspondence from this country and abroad. I’m still adding to the collection. It’s open to the public.

Shortly before they were to leave Yale, Jim Serra had e-mailed Laurel and me from New Haven to confirm his and his friends’ visit. The members also had plans for visits in upper New York State and in Maine before heading back to Texas. Laurel and I always find such infrequent meetings very evocative—unique signs of the reach of Jane’s work to a variety of individuals, each with his or her own creative and intuitional skills. This is both humbling and worthwhile, that Jane’s love and inspiration has helped so many others. And still does.

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.

The Butts family does have a bit of history in Elmira, though. Here are a few clues for anyone even remotely interested. In the last two decades of the 1800s my grandfather Otis and his wife raised four children on their farm in Wellsboro, PA, a farming community some 50 miles from Elmira, New York. At the age of 15 my father, Robert Sr., followed his three older siblings, Jay and Ernest and Ella, in leaving the farm. All did well, each in his and her way. Ernest left the northeast and never married. After Jay and Ella had each married they settled in Elmira. Jay and his wife had children. My father married Estelle (Stell) in Newark, NJ in 1917, and I was born two years later in Mansfield, a small community near Wellsboro.

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....

On Sunday we went out to breakfast, and then went to some of the Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain historical sites. (I am a student of mediumship, as well as a reader of and believer in the Seth material. Mark Twain and his wife [as well as Jane Roberts, Robert Butts, and Seth] called Elmira, New York, home for years, and appear to still be psychologically involved with the sites.)

The Seth material, as Jane and Rob spoke and wrote it between 1963 and 1984 has brought insights and inspiration to millions of people, including myself. I have often been interested in the vast differences in the goals and characters of the many readers who visit and correspond. The Seth material was magical to me as soon as I started reading the first book I found in a used bookstore, Seth Speaks, in 1979. Many other readers have felt the same way. Rob and Jane and Seth’s magic has brought new interest and purpose into the lives of many different kinds of people. The exact number of readers is unknown, but over the years many people have visited and have written to Rob and Jane.

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.