“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.

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.”

Some will disagree with my felt premise and this is their right, of course. But after working with Jane and the many complicated and interwoven facets of the Seth material that she produced for more than 20 years, I no longer believe in “chance” or “coincidence.” I humbly submit that somehow, somewhere, there are connections, intuitions, whispers and shouts and facts that proclaim our greater reality’s depth and being, its independence of our ordinary conscious ideas of space and time. More and more, but especially since Jane’s death on September 5, 1984, I have tried to be open to those fascinating and unending interrelationships we create individually and en masse and so live with.

But first: One day in late November 1963, Jane sat at her writing table in the living room while I left to paint in my studio at the back of the apartment. We often followed this routine when we didn’t have to be out of the house. My wife liked to tune into a radio station that featured classical music while she worked; she kept its volume low enough so that it didn’t bother me. After some time on that particular day I realized that all was quiet—too quiet—out there in the living room. When I went out to see what Jane was up to I was greeted with her breakthrough accomplishment—one that, to put it mildly, was to lead to very unexpected challenges and growths in our lives: Jane held up a sheaf of typewriter paper upon which she had scribbled in large handwriting an essay that had come to her as fast as she could write it down: The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. She didn’t know where the work had come from, how she had produced it. She’d felt as though she was out of her body some of the time, out on the first floor’s porch roof looking in at herself. “What does it mean?” she asked as we discussed it. She was exhilarated, intrigued, cautious, wondering about its ideas—that basically each one of us creates our own reality in the most intimate terms, for example.

She was of course very familiar with the spontaneous role her creative self enacted when she was writing, especially in her poetry. But this? We were to learn that the conscious yet intuitive pace of her realizations was carefully meted out by her psyche: just so much at a time. For the first few days after I finally got it through my head what Jane was really saying in her essay I couldn’t accept the idea that each one of us literally, really, creates our own reality. Conventional thinking simply couldn’t, wouldn’t accept that, I said, although I didn’t regard myself as a conventional thinker. But her breakthrough had set the agenda for our lifetimes-to-come: idea construction, all right!

Jane had read about the Ouija board and expressed casual interest in it, but hadn’t tried to obtain one; nor was there a local supplier. What conscious and unconscious communications, we were to wonder, had led her to mention the board to Jimmy? What kind of a “coincidence” was that, anyhow? Out of all of the apartments for rent in Elmira, why had Jane chosen that one? She had found the apartment. She came to Elmira with me after I’d begun working for the greeting-card company, Artistic, to look for a place for us so we could move from Sayre and save the time and expense of commuting 30 miles a day, five days a week. She found the empty apartment 5 at 458 on her first day of looking. When I picked her up after leaving work she directed me to the apartment, and that was that. Jimmy had lost interest in psychic phenomena long ago.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Trust, then, entered in in a unique way, even before Jane opted more consciously for more direct help from Seth within the limits she created. As I’ve noted, she avoided doctors and the hospital as much as possible until her last long stay in St. Joseph’s.

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!”

Periodically, after answering the mail, I add it to the archives of the Seth material at Yale University Library as an integral part, a reinforcement, say, of Jane’s great body of work. It’s well preserved there. I speculate that eventually someone may write a book showing the great variety of reader reactions to the Seth material. It would—and will—be a vital addition to the work my wife began, and so help perpetuate it. Producing such a loving compendium would require much study. And a continuing one, as long as more mail arrives....

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.

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.

Early in this introduction I wrote that late in November 1963 Jane had had an out-of-body experience while writing her essay, The Physical Universe as Idea Construction—that she had looked in at herself from the porch roof outside our windows. That had been the porch she referred to. Long gone.

I also described to our guests the great Seckel pear tree that had grown so beautifully in the back yard, with some of its branches—and fruit— within my reach from the windows of the studio. It must have died years ago, as did its companion, the apple tree I had drawn to illustrate Jane’s poem, “The You-ness of the Universe,” in her book of poems, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time (1975). At the Sayre house I have the large oil painting I did of the sunlight streaming through the windows of the studio on a certain day early in August: the only day in the year that the ever-moving sun casts that particular intriguing pattern of light and shadow across the bare wooden floor.

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....

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!

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...?