“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

Given our situation, I took care of my wife as best I could. As the years passed our lives became more and more restricted physically. It became increasingly difficult for Jane to walk in public. When we went food shopping, for example, she would sit in the car in the parking lot, perhaps reading, while I pushed the grocery cart up and down the aisles. We gradually gave up on vacations, in the usual sense of traveling. Strangely, the traveling aspect of the symptoms bothered us the least: we were too immersed in our daily lives with either full-time or part-time jobs (in the beginning), but always with writing, painting, the Seth material, ESP class, seeing friends, and so forth. Jane did conduct several quite successful long-distance experiments with the Gallaghers when they vacationed in the Caribbean Islands. We made dated notes and times of her impressions so she could check them when our friends returned. Interpreting the impressions was sometimes quite difficult. Jane did have direct hits listed, but for other impressions Peg and Bill couldn’t agree on the accuracy and/or timing of certain activities. And sometimes they said the impressions were just wrong.

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.

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.

During this time also Jane’s mother, Marie, lost her home in Saratoga Springs, NY, and was placed in a state-run nursing home in nearby Middle Grove. Through the mail mother and daughter patched up their volatile relationship enough to begin exchanging letters fairly regularly. Jane never told Marie about the Seth material, or her symptoms. Marie even accepted me as her daughter’s husband. The two gave each other Christmas gifts. Jane sent her mother nightwear and stationery and other small useful presents. Marie always sent her daughter sweaters that she had knitted with great difficulty because of her misshapen fingers; invariably the garments were too large. Seth suggested that Jane not wear them in any case because of the roiled emotions that had existed between the two almost from Jane’s birth; gifts from the mother could still carry those feelings. Mother and daughter were to never meet again: Marie died shortly before 1975. By then it wasn’t easy for Jane to travel, and we didn’t make the approximately 400-mile roundtrip to attend the funeral. Later the nursing home was closed by the state. A mutual friend sent us photographs of the big old red-brick building, three stories high, shuttered and dark and deserted among the trees and in the snow.

And guess what: I finally understood as Jane’s symptoms began to slowly grow that her choices were her right, and stopped my innuendos that it was perfectly all right for her to be open to outside help—so why wasn’t she? Seth was way ahead of me. I don’t recall that worthy ever suggesting to my wife outright that she seek medical help, let alone insisting that she do so. Was this because Jane wouldn’t allow him to say that, even if he wanted to? As noted, at times I’d felt that that was the case. It’s easy to proclaim that we human beings live short of our potentials in those terms—for if such potentials didn’t exist, how could we sense or aspire to them? But I’m hardly being original when I insist that each life is so intensely real that it seems most difficult to truly believe that we can have it any other way—let alone have more than one! Our challenges in this physical/nonphysical existence reign supreme, regardless of other possible long-term influences like reincarnation or time travel, for example. Or—yes—even religion: a subject I would like to explore in depth if ever I can create the several years of camouflage time necessary to do so. So even if Seth did help, still Jane chose to live her own life within the face and force of her own very creative present personality. Seth did offer insights, excellent ones of certain very creative depths that we more than welcomed, while all the time being quite aware, I think, that the beautiful young woman through whom he spoke—who let him speak—had her own agenda at the same time. And even though we agreed with Seth’s reincarnational material involving the three of us, and our families, still it was also intensely personal for my wife in this life that she go her own way.

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!”

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.

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.