“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Obviously, this introduction will be incomplete. It will also be rather unorthodox—more like a series of conscious and unconscious reminiscences and free associations, moving back and forth in time as I approach sets of ideas from various angles while seeking to learn more about my wife even now, 18 years after her death. Jane’s death may have been physical, yet she still lives, still offers insights, still makes me reach to understand and grow as I mourn her passing. She died at the age of 55. What more could she have accomplished in our camouflage reality had she chosen to live physically for, say, even another decade? Wonderfully penetrating things, I’m sure—and I believe that she is indeed doing so, “where she is now.”

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 As this group of sessions slowly accumulated, often as “deleted” or unpublished portions of “regular” sessions, Jane and I took it for granted that since they were personal they would stay that way.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.

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.

At the board, my wife clumsily reached a personality named Frank Watts, an American schoolteacher who told us he’d died in 1931. He gave us very brief, halting and sometimes disconnected answers during our first three board sessions. Yet in that third session Frank Watts told us that Jane had “Too much aggression.” That she had been a “Medium.” in a previous life, that her present “Timidity has roots of rage.” from “Previous hates unresolved.” that she “Must conquer now.” When I asked Frank Watts about those unresolved hates, he replied “No information direct permitted.”

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.

Often, I could hear a powerful Seth through two closed doors. And so, we learned more than once in warm weather, could neighbors and passersby on West Water Street when our windows were open. But those occasions were relatively minor: consider the situation inside the house! Long ago, the three floors of the old house, a typical turn-of-the-last-century “mansion” on the main street three blocks west of Elmira’s business district, had been converted into eight apartments. All were continuously occupied during the 15 years Jane and I (and Seth for the last 11 of those years) lived there. Turnover was low, and we knew most of the other tenants, although no more than one or two of them at any time had an inkling of what we were up to with first the sessions and then the addition of the ESP classes. Even now I still correspond with two of those “ex-tenants”—loyal friends indeed!

Reading these private sessions, one can legitimately ask: “Well, if Jane Roberts was so smart and Seth was so great with all of that personal stuff, why did she come down with the symptoms to begin with? Why couldn’t he cure her, or at least help her?” My answer right here is that those questions were and still are answered to the best of the abilities of Jane, Seth, and myself in these private sessions, even while I keep in mind Frank Watts’s references to Jane’s “Timidity has roots of rage.” from “Previous hates unresolved.” These sessions will detail in many ways and times why my beloved wife, even with all of her creative dedication to her chosen path, ended up with what finally came to be her intractable physical impairments. Part of the answer, as I’ve already noted, is that because of her strong fears from early childhood on, Jane did not allow Seth to tell us all he could have. Not that she was consciously aware of why she refused, and not that the elimination of that barrier alone would have magically wiped away the challenges the two of us were creating. But again and again I felt, I knew, that reincarnational factors were involved, concerning not only Jane, Seth, and me, but a number of other “past” personalities and influences from any of the three of us, and in various camouflage time frames. And what about that influence from the “future,” since Seth maintained that all is now? I didn’t berate Jane to open up more psychically. I saw her struggles (and had plenty of my own). I sensed walls, barriers, and complications there. Some of them arose from the very uniqueness of her position. After all, here she was, speaking in trance for a personality who told us he’d last lived on Earth in Denmark 300 years ago—even if there is no such thing as time!

Seth, very briefly and with his underlining in Session 54 on May 18, 1964: “I could not tell you in the beginning in so many words that Ruburt (Jane) is myself, because you would have leaped to the conclusion that I was Ruburt’s subconscious mind, and this is not so. When you understand the construction of entities, then you will understand how this can be so. Ruburt is not myself now, in his present life; he is nevertheless an extension and materialization of the Seth that I was at one time. Nothing remains unchanging, personalities and entities least of all...I realize this is somewhat difficult, but...Ruburt is now the result of the Seth that I once was, for I have changed since then.”

Yet Jane and I began to truly understand that the challenges, potentials, and probabilities in our lives could easily outstrip our ordinary daily capacities to grasp them. We began to feel that the probable realities alone that we could create and explore, for example, were “probably” endless in ordinary terms. Now, all of these years later, I’m sure of it.

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.

Ed wanted to find number 92, the old double house that Jane had described to him as being her childhood home. We had crawled halfway along the avenue, between its dim corner streetlights, when my car’s headlights brushed over a shadowy feminine figure walking in our direction. Indeed, I was driving past the lady when Ed, looking back, exclaimed: “Hey, wait, Bob—that’s her! That’s Jane right there now. Pull over—” He was lowering his side window even as he spoke. Yes, it was Jane Zeh, expressing surprise in a clear musical voice at such a “chance” meeting as she came even with the car. I could see only part of her silhouette as Ed introduced us and told her I’d be working for him. Jane didn’t have a license to drive. She said that if she happened to be in Schuylerville during the day she’d stop in at Ed’s studio in town and say hello. (She did, but several weeks later.) Right then, she told us she was on her way to see her bedridden mother, Marie, as she often did at that time of night. She pointed out number 92, a few doors ahead of us. I said something innocuous to the effect that I looked forward to meeting her and her husband next Saturday night.

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.

It was no accident, Jane and I often said, that we were so quickly attracted to each other. Not only because of our simple love for one another and our mutual interests—but even then, I came to understand, because we could intuitively sense the fine creative adventure in consciousness that was to become the Seth material. (We didn’t give a thought, however, to anything like reincarnation, let alone to such connections involving us.) Even now, 18 years after Jane’s death in l984, I’m as committed to our work as ever. I have no reasons or motivations to present myself as being really cautious or asking my wife to be careful as she began to unleash the great flow of creativity that was to follow. I welcomed it after my first hesitance at accepting her themes in Idea Construction, and as it created its many-faceted path through our lives. On November 26, 1963, when Jane and I received those first incoherent “messages” on a borrowed Ouija board, our world views began to change, to enlarge. And more and more the Seth material became as deeply intertwined with my visual art as it did with Jane’s written art.

I had kept my very strong feelings for Jane to myself, or so I’d thought, and despaired at the idea of never seeing her again. I was the complete amateur at dealing with the personal interactions of others. I visited Walt and Jane at their apartment in Saratoga Springs and told them I’d be leaving the area. Jane discussed the decision she and Walt had made. Then, directly to me: “I’m leaving town, with or without you. So which is it going to be?” I was quite unprepared, yet knew at once what my answer would be. Even though I’d had no thought of interfering with, or taking advantage of, any complications between them. I can see Walt now, sitting by the window of their second-story apartment’s small living room, nodding at Jane’s words, his eyes wet. There was never a harsh word between us. Jane’s dog, Mischa, slept at her feet. It was only after Jane had begun the Seth material a number of years later that we realized that she and Walt, both coming from dysfunctional families, had chosen to come together at just the right time for their own mutually creative learning purposes—and that with those purposes fulfilled, each of them was ready to move on by the time I met them. At the time, however, I wasn’t ready to consciously understand such interlocking emotional relationships even though I was playing a part in one of them.

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.

Professional writing was simply outside of their experience. They did understand that we had a creative relationship with the arts, and that we obviously loved each other. For whatever psychological and psychic reasons, the lack of communication on that score between the two “sides” suited both. I don’t remember Jane and me showing my parents any of the Seth material, for example, and trying to explain what we were searching for within it. For all of the six years that we held the early sessions, we never mentioned them to my parents as we sought to go our own way. Nor did we discuss with them the information Seth occasionally gave us about them. For that to be possible, my parents would have had to understand what the Seth material was all about. There was no animosity about the situation, let alone conscious curiosity about what to do, on either side, although now I think there must have been at least an unconscious telepathic understanding and acceptance among the four of us.

I do want to record that while we took great comfort in receiving the mail, we also came to receive through it an additional and totally unexpected gift—one that literally we would never have asked for even if we had thought of it. Maude Cardwell, an older Seth reader in Austin, Texas, had for several years been publishing a modest monthly journal on the Seth material that she called Reality Change. When I wrote her about Jane’s latest hospitalization Maude, without mentioning her idea to me, suggested to her readers that donations would help Jane and me cope with our hospital bills. I would have never had the nerve to make such a statement. St. Joe’s, as we called the hospital, had never dunned us for money in the past, and wasn’t doing so now. Our considerable daily charges were mounting, but we had emotionally pushed their import into the background. I was able to make modest payments out of royalty income I had been saving, but this was difficult to keep up because most of that money was paid to us but twice a year. Imagine, then, our great surprise when the readers of Reality Change began to contribute: small checks; medium checks; the occasional larger check. I have every one of those letters and my heartfelt answers in a separate file that I plan to add as a unit to the collection of Jane’s and my work in the archives of Yale University Library.

For example: In Session 510, on January 19, 1970 in Volume Nine of The Early Sessions, Seth remarked: “Now. I have been helping Ruburt. The energy that I would put into sessions has gone into some private talks to him while he slept. These have resulted in necessary insights on his part that will themselves cause the release of energy from the inner self.” And my notes follow: (For the last several days Jane has been telling me about a string of insights and revelations she has been experiencing, both asleep and awake. She feels these are very beneficial and has been putting them to immediate use. She feels she has lately realized a group of truths that she hadn’t understood before, etc.)

I’m sure that Seth and Jane, whether or not they’re together, per se, have each been more than a little amused to watch me at my labors here—but also compassionate and sharing from “where they are now.” I’m pleased to believe that they have psychically joined me as I write this introduction, and that they know I have tried to be objective. I also feel that they will be with me as I enter into this account’s final episode, one involving Laurel’s and my most interesting meeting with a group of visitors.

Next, at Jim’s request we visited the apartment house at 458 West Water Street that Jane and I had lived in when we moved to Elmira from Sayre in I960. We had stayed there until 1975, when we purchased the hill house at 1730 Pinnacle Road in West Elmira. Some years after we had moved out, the apartment house was painted a garish green, a color that was quite out of keeping with all of the other houses in the neighborhood. Now, the color is unevenly faded. The whole sprawling house looks shoddy, sagging almost, in need of general repair.

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.

I pushed open the back fire door and the six of us clumped down the open stairs that Jane and I had used so many times. I worried about being an intruder into the domain of the people who lived in those dingy apartments now. Indeed, as we left the stairs two dogs in a back apartment set up a furious barking as they scratched at what I knew were kitchen windows. A friend of ours had lived in that apartment (and I still correspond with him). I was embarrassed: the dogs’ racket must have bothered everyone in the house. We saw no one, however, and the barking magically ceased as we moved around to the east side of 458 and surveyed it from a small paved parking lot. Once in that spot there had been flagstones and benches beneath an extended roof supported by four sets of wooden pillars. The tin-covered roof had born layers of old vines that had climbed up the pillars from our living-room windows on the second floor. Jane had liked to throw seed and bread crusts into the vines for the squirrels and birds to root out. The pigeons, cardinals, sparrows, blue jays and others had flown over from the Chemung River a quarter of a block away.

My parents lived briefly in Elmira, and then moved to Sayre in 1923 after having traveled to California. Hardly strange, then, that I found work as an artist in Elmira, and that Jane and I moved there in 1960, five years after our marriage. I still have third-and-fourth generation relatives in Elmira, although I’m not close to them. This is as much my fault as anyone else’s. Jane and I became so wrapped up in our own little worlds that we didn’t try to reach out. I tell myself that I should try to do that, even now, however.

Often I think of the routines Jane and I settled into upon moving into 1730 in 1975. She was 46; I was 56. Now it seems that all of those years to follow passed in a flash. Routines, yes, but also ever-changing ones that still revolved around the simple elements of the work we loved and carried out amid the unexpected freedoms of living so much closer to the environment we had always taken for granted: the writing and painting, the sessions and mail, the publishing of books, the visits of friends and fans, some even from Europe. The hill house was the first property either one of us had ever owned, yet even within that loving context Jane gradually had more and more trouble walking even while the Seth material continued to grow in reach and flexibility, to attract a wider and wider audience. We saw deer in the back yard and put feed out for them and the birds. (The deer went into hiding during the hunting seasons.)

We quickly made friends with the family across the road. Joseph and Margaret Bumbalo had three children, all living away from home. The youngest, John, who visited his parents occasionally, was attracted by the ideas in Jane’s work. (Now that was a coincidence!) He had, and still has, no doubt, a most powerful and moving baritone voice. He was also restless. When we met, John had little interest in an operatic career, as far as I recall, yet had taken professional singing lessons and given auditions. When he crossed the road to visit I would encourage him to sing a bit for us a cappella. The few brief times he did so I thrilled to the power and quality of his voice; I could feel it surging within me, as could Jane. John’s masculine power, while different from Jane’s Seth voice at its masculine strongest, represented the only time I’ve personally heard a voice that could match Seth’s voice at its best. Both voices could make my ears ring, conjuring up deep-seated wordless emotions that usually lay unsuspected within the psyche. Very revealing, Jane and John.

Jane and I lived in the hill house while she had her greatest initial successes with publishing the Seth material, and before she went into the hospital for good on April 20, 1983. Of course 1730 is still a large part of my life, as it is of Laurel’s, even while we use it for storage of all of the treasures it still contains: many of my paintings, files stuffed with records that are destined for the collection at Yale University Library, Laurel’s books and mine, and her records and possessions—all of those intimate signs of life that now seem suspended in our creations of space/time. Laurel came to live with me there on August 23, 1985, 11 months after Jane’s death. And may I add that she wasn’t enamored of my late-night running either. Now, at 83, I walk or run just about every day over the streets I knew so well as a child—only I do it in the daytime. It’s a treat, a privilege, to be able to do it each day. Then I do some painting. I have evenings free to answer mail and write and proofread books like this one. While I still feel the pull of all of those secret nighttimes out of 1730....

That night in Sayre, and the next day, Laurel mentioned her near encounter with the hawk or eagle several times before we finally got down to really discussing what had happened at 1730. I drew a crude map of the house and its grounds as seen from above. The front of the house, facing Pinnacle Road, cannot be seen from where all of us were standing in the driveway to the side and in back of it. On the map Laurel showed me how the bird had suddenly zoomed into view low over the house from Pinnacle Road, and then flown even lower toward the two women near the back of the second car in the driveway. Laurel exclaimed now about the bird’s enormous wingspan as it had seemed to fly right at her. It had made no sound except for the rush of air through its wings. Obviously my wife hadn’t been prepared for its seemingly friendly behavior.

Now here is Laurel’s own account of our guests’ visit, and what was to her—and to me—a most unusual event.

On this October day last fall, as we stood in Jane and Rob’s driveway, (now my driveway also) at Pinnacle Road, Rob and most of the group started looking around the front of the house. I stood talking at the entrance of our driveway with a writer in the group.