“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] That personality was rather collarless (as spelled out on the board).” Also: “I was Frank Watts to learn humility.” [...] 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. [...] 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. [...]

In 1931 in Saratoga Springs, New York, Jane’s father, Delmer Roberts (or Del) chose to exercise the probability that he would leave his wife Marie and their daughter Jane, who was not yet three years old. [...] Jane was a second child following her mother’s earlier miscarriage. Already Marie was showing signs of arthritis. Jane and I came to believe that it was hardly accidental that her mother quickly became bedridden—for life—following the departure of her husband. Minnie Finn was killed by a hit-and-run speeding motorist one icy winter day on her way to the corner store to buy the young girl some shredded wheat for supper—a tragedy that Marie never stopped blaming her daughter for. [...] The young Jane spent almost two years in a Catholic orphanage for women while her mother was hospitalized. [...] The two women’s Catholicism became even stricter: it was often bolstered by the head of the local church coming to Sunday dinner at the old two-family house at 92 Middle Avenue, in one of the lower-income sections of Saratoga Springs.

[...] 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’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. [...] 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.

A strong saving grace in all of the personal and household turmoil she lived in, Jane told me often, was her relationship with her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo, her “Little Daddy,” as she called him because of his diminutive size. [...] He was a man of few words, yet he nurtured in his granddaughter a love of nature that she was to cherish for the rest of her life. In Appendix 1, Volume 1 of The “Unknown” Reality, published in 1977, I partially quote Seth as saying that Joseph Burdo was “Part of a very strong entity. [...] He lived alone in rented rooms and worked at various jobs in town; he was a doorman, a watchman. [...] He died in 1949 at 68, when Jane was 20 years old.

[...] I was the complete amateur at dealing with the personal interactions of others. [...] So which is it going to be?” I was quite unprepared, yet knew at once what my answer would be. [...] There was never a harsh word between us. [...] 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. [...]

[...] It hadn’t helped when it was offered. The connections involving her mother’s bedridden condition and her tempestuous temper, including her suicide attempts, both faked and real, troubles with a succession of housekeepers, the lack of a father, the almost two years she spent in a Catholic orphanage while Marie was hospitalized, the death of her beloved grandfather, the whole strained atmosphere within which the gifted and impressionable child was growing, as well as her conflicts with church dogma and personalities, had, all together, powerful effects indeed. [...] Jane named that loving young creature Mischa, and he was to offer her great comfort for years, just as he did to me when later we met. And I learned that the symptoms were not only a possibility that was native within my wife, but were to become corrosively alive within her all of those years later. [...]

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. [...] 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. [...] 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.

She was of course very familiar with the spontaneous role her creative self enacted when she was writing, especially in her poetry. [...] 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. [...]

[...] He was to later just give us the board. Jimmy (long deceased) was a kind and outgoing landlord and restaurateur who lived with his wife and three children on the second floor of the old converted horse barn and carriage house in back of the apartment house he owned at 458 West Water Street, where Jane and I lived. [...] Jimmy was the chief cook at Lib’s. Busy as he was, he always welcomed us when we stepped into his kitchen to say hello.

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? [...] 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. [...] 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!