“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

September 20, 2002. How strange, I found myself thinking as I prepared to write this introduction, that 37 years would pass before I’d start publishing this series of personal sessions and excerpts that had been dictated by my wife, Jane Roberts, for Seth, the “energy personality essence” she spoke for while in a trance state.

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 also think that in her unique private and public ways Jane explored time as well, as evocatively, as anyone ever has. An immodest statement, I submit, but I’m proud to have shared in her creativity, and I offer The Personal Sessions series as a testament to what she sought to accomplish in all of her writings—and did indeed accomplish, in my opinion.

Do I think it a “coincidence,” then, that I received the page proofs, or galleys, to check for Volume 1 of The Personal Sessions from publisher Rick Stack on September 5, 2002, when Jane died on the same day 18 years ago?

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 As this group of sessions slowly accumulated, often as “deleted” or unpublished portions of “regular” sessions, Jane and I took it for granted that since they were personal they would stay that way.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

Yet every so often in this series I’ll be including sessions that are also of more outgoing subject matter—more like the sessions in Jane’s published Seth books. Later volumes of The Personal Sessions will also include a whole book that Jane delivered for me on the great l7th-Century Dutch artist Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. This book has never been published. It’s not a Seth book, but one of the three “world view” books from highly creative people in the arts that Jane tuned into on her own as gifts for me. The other two are The World View of Paul Cézanne (1977), and The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James (1978). When we get to the Rembrandt material in this series I’ll offer my interpretation of Jane’s very interesting world-view material.

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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

During her journey (and mine) I helped her publish 19 volumes of the Seth material, fiction, and poetry, and since her death in 1984 I’ve added 12 more so far, including this first volume of The Personal Sessions. I’m sure that Jane knows what I’m doing, and identifies with the poignancy I feel as I begin this latest publishing venture. That very poignancy enriches the value of this long-range endeavor for me as, I trust, it will for others.

I’ve noted that many of the sessions in this personal series will not be complete, but deleted excerpts from published sessions. Often over the years Jane and I tried to balance the subject matter of the sessions as Seth sought to help us in whatever way. This approach included what I thought Jane allowed him to say.

That overall format developed, then, out of the needs and abilities of and permissions of the three of us—two physical, one nonphysical. As the sessions piled up and books were published that balancing between public and private material came to seem quite natural; it actually became another portion of Jane’s abilities that was as creative in its way as any other aspect of the sessions: if the personal sessions were available, why not take them? Often they helped greatly, as the record will show in my attempt to publish all of the Seth material. Jane, then, grew in more ways than one at once.

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.

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.”

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

When he spoke through Jane for the first time in Session 4 on December 8, 1964, Seth not only gave us his own entity name—Seth, of course—but those for Jane and me: Ruburt and Joseph. He was quite amused that Jane didn’t particularly like the name Ruburt. “Strange to the strange,” he told us. See Volume 1 of The Early Sessions. Yet Ruburt and Seth met on certain common grounds that were to be developed in depth over the years. Indeed, each one of us had particular qualities of life—memories, emotions, events—to explore “this time around.” I’m sure that Jane and Seth, those two parts of our triumvirate, are relatively involved in their afterdeath challenges, each from her and his nonphysical viewpoint. Just as I’m doing in this earthly environment that I’m helping to create—preparatory, possibly, to joining them “later” in our ordinary terms of time. That, I’m sure, is a privilege I’ll have full freedom to carry out, if I choose to.

I never saw my wife blame Seth because she had her symptoms, nor did I ever refuse to help her hold the sessions until she got rid of them. Almost unconsciously, it seemed, the three of us were committed to creative growth in spite of all obstacles, whatever their cause or nature, or the amount of camouflage time involved.

Nor again, in presenting these private sessions and Jane’s and my travails, am I looking for sympathy. Instead, I’m passionately interested in presenting our work with Seth so as to contribute in whatever ways possible to our understanding of this reality we’re all creating together. And, dear readers, the participation of each one of you in those efforts help make that possible. I thank you, one and all.

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.

They were also the forms, with the addition of fiction, that she worked within for the first nine years of our marriage on December 27, 1954. She began the sessions in December 1963.

Nor did I brush aside my deep concerns about her symptoms because of the excitement stemming from the appearance, then the steady growth and complexity, of the sessions. Instead we became involved in a long process of trying to understand my wife’s impairments as they fluctuated over the years, and then finally did not leave her completely at all. Seth told us a number of times that Jane did not have arthritis, like her mother Marie did, but had instead started to develop deep self-protective defense mechanisms at an early age as a result of her chaotic and fatherless upbringing.

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.

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.)

A month later, in Session l68 on July 7, he did tell me that the work was an excellent likeness; Jane had liked it from the day I began working on it. And why hadn’t I ever painted the two of them together? I could even insert myself into the art, since I’m the third member of the triumvirate. In short, I believe there’s no end to our abilities in whatever reality we choose to create and explore.

Apart from my questions and speculations, I think it significant that Jane had waited until she had produced the first 207 sessions of the Seth material, over a period of a year and 11 months, before she really began to allow Seth to come through with outright personal material about her—as if first the two had to learn to know each other that well by bridging not only space but our historical or camouflage time. This opening volume of The Personal Sessions begins with an excerpt from Session 208, on November 15, 1965. During the nearly two years before that there were very sporadic mentions by Seth about Jane’s challenges, usually occurring as brief interludes that we deleted from the published sessions. Of course, neither one of us ever considered the possibility that many years later these personal sessions would be published.

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.)

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.

Jane and I were very surprised at the initial reception of The Seth Material, then Seth Speaks and Personal Reality (our shortened terminology for those first two Seth-dictated books.) Since we had no experience with “fan mail,” for example, we had no expectations, but as the Seth titles and Jane’s own books were published she came to spend many a weekend answering that most welcome mail. I helped out when I could after typing sessions, often doing commercial art at least part-time, and trying to paint. The mail rapidly became a quite humbling education in itself. The writers of those letters opened up in specific terms worlds that we’d have never known about otherwise, and, eventually, they did so not only from this country but also from abroad. Seventeen language translations as I write this. How interesting to see that each one of us was indeed creating our personal reality within the overall reality of the universe that all of us were also creating, uniting all—everything—in complicated fashions far beyond our ordinarily accepted understanding. Time travels for sure; travels not only through the psyche but through time—even if Seth did call that quality we were so used to “camouflage time!”

Mary Dillman, a volunteer, works with and cares for the collection at the library. She has been, and is, a great help in organizing that mass of material, coordinating and computerizing it for researchers in a number of interesting ways that Jane and I hadn’t thought of doing “way back when” my wife was delivering the sessions. Ways that, indeed, wouldn’t have been possible even if we’d had the camouflage time to carry them out in those long-ago days. The blinding speed and depth of association via modern technology simply hadn’t existed.

The door to Apartment 5 was closed. Locked? Was anyone home? I didn’t try to find out as all of us stood there. Seth had first come through Jane in the living room of that apartment, in Session 4 on December 8, 1962. Thirty-nine years ago. I couldn’t believe it....

From the parking lot I pointed out to our guests the windows of Apartment 5 as they marched along the side of 458 on the second floor. Our landlord, Jimmy Spaziani, had told us that the entire apartment had been the master-bedroom complex of the wealthy merchant who had built the house for his family more than a century ago. The kitchen with its three tiny windows near the front of the house had been a closet; the three bay windows of the living room where Jane had held the sessions and her ESP class had been the main bedroom. Next comes the oversized bathroom with its stained glass window, tiled floor, and marble shower with eight nozzles. Jane and I had really enjoyed that shower! Then comes a smaller room that we had used as a bedroom, with one window in the back wall of the house. Finally, there’s the last room with its windows on three sides as it juts out on iron posts from the back of the house. Originally it had been a sun parlor. The room is open underneath. It had been my studio, and I’d had to insulate the floor.

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.)

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....

When Jane entered the hospital for the last 21 months of her life, I could run all I wanted to. I usually spent the morning typing the session she had delivered the afternoon before for The Way Toward Health, answering mail, running, and running errands. I went to her room at noon and stayed until the evening, seven days a week, every week. I still remember asking myself as I trotted along on my 65th birthday on June 20: “Should I still be doing this?” My answer was yes, for that action, free of any other personal responsibility, helped me stay connected with the outside world in my own way. Jane died later that year. John Bumbalo did me an enormous favor in the hours following Jane’s death. When I came home from the hospital for the last time in a year and 9 months, John went to Jane’s room 330 and very carefully gathered up all of the belongings and artifacts we had accumulated there and brought them to me in 1730: my paintings and drawings, the letters from readers that I had put up on the walls (the hospital never complained), the session notebooks for The Way Toward Health, our books and magazines and newspapers and clothes, the flowers and other gifts from readers and from some of the nurses—all of those things that seem to accumulate almost by themselves as one seeks to create a home wherever that may be.

At the hill house Jane and I used to see such birds, but soaring and circling high above, perhaps with their superb vision searching for small birds and animals. We never saw one behave as Laurel described. A sign of a message from the universe, she said! I thought of trying to paint a portrait of a hawk or an eagle. I thought of its enormous beauty and energy, the creative energy that sustains us all, in whatever form we choose to create and to live by and with. Thank you, Laurel and Jane and 458 and 1730 and our guests, for reminding me of that as I bring this introduction to The Personal Sessions to an end—even while I feel its persistent challenge to grow into a book of its own. Maybe someday...?