“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Once again a crisis situation has come about. It’s now 8:30 PM. At about 7 PM, we were eating supper and watching Buck Rogers on TV, when Jane had another panic attack. This one was more extensive. It also took me a bit to realize that it was starting to show itself in the form of hallucinations or disorientation. Right after she’d finished eating, Jane began to ramble, talking about making impossible verbal rituals that she had to carry out before she could eat her ice cream for dessert. These periods were contrasted with examples of lucidity: “I’m going to make it,” although such periods were far in the minority compared to her ramblings about performing these rituals before she could perform any meaningful physical act like eating dessert. I cannot really explain what she said; it was too rapid and varied, and I had no notebook handy. She tried to make sense out of uncommon sense data. At one time Jane thought she was on the commode in the bedroom, and began to pull up her blouse. Another time she thought she was in her writing room while I did the dishes.

(One of my first thoughts was that the dreaded time had come—that no matter what Seth had been saying lately, or what Jane and I thought about her getting better, she was actually worse off than ever. I envisioned calling Dr. Kardon tomorrow, to get Jane into the hospital—a prospect both of us shrank from indeed. I thought that even my wife would be forced to agree to such a move.

(Our time was running out. If, as Seth has repeatedly said lately, Jane was clearing her psyche, then I feared that she’d begun her task too late, mentally and physically. As Peggy J had said today, Jane needed nursing care that neither she nor I could provide now. That leaves but one alternative, and my thought and fear is that if Jane goes into the hospital again, the sessions are over—for good. And who knows what the hell will happen to us for the rest of our lives? Of such ingredients are cosmic farces made, I thought. It can be seen that I was having a hard time to keep from falling into the deep pessimism I’d experienced not long ago, and seemingly had rebounded from.

(Jane refused to lie down this morning while I went to Gerould’s, so I had to get her out of bed, after changing the dressings, within 10 minutes. As I sit here writing this evening, her legs are fatter than ever. Yet she herself first came up with the insight tonight that the panic was expressing itself through her disorientations and/or hallucinations. A very important point, a creative insight. She got mad at me briefly just now when I demanded to know if I would really get a session tonight: “Bob, I’m trying as hard as I can. I said you’d get one. You’ll get one.” Yet the next moment she was back hallucinating. A few minutes ago she’d told me that she had to have the session in order to get rid of the anxiety-hallucination complex.

(8:28. I was surprised when Seth abruptly came through just as I finished the above notes. Jane’s voice was good, her head down, eyes closed; she swayed to her left often. I was about to note that the session was probably a last gasp attempt to learn something important, to keep going on our own, before our world began to fall apart.

(“This thing has almost got the best of me,” I’d told Peggy this afternoon, “after 15 years.” I didn’t mean I hadn’t played my own role in all of it, for obviously I had. I explained to Peggy our insurance options. I stressed, however, that Jane’s challenges were still primarily psychological, and that her “cure” lay in that direction. I devoutly hope and trust that this session will mark the beginning of something very good. I demanded a session, I’d told Jane, if it was at all possible.)

(8:30. “I’m about ready to fall off the bed,” Jane said, going back into her disoriented state at once. Actually, she was leaning again to her left in the chair.

(I was pleased at the way the session was going—and indeed amazed that Jane could manage to pull it off at all, given her circumstances. She said no more, just smoked. The TV was on, without sound. The cats slept beside the waterbed in the living room. The room was lit with a soft yellow glow.

(8:47.) Those early feelings date back to Ruburt’s early childhood. They are the final, and yet first expressions of that panic. Therefore, they can be extremely valuable. There was also of course the event of St. Vincent’s. Also numerous small abandonments when Ruburt was still younger—but with your help he can indeed clear both mind, body and spirit, for he senses that relief, and knows it is at least within his grasp.

(8:54. Once again I helped Jane lift her head level with mine. and lean back against her pillow. She was also hallucinating again, wondering if it was safe to sit up and relax.

(“Because I’m going to have to let go or do something pretty quick.... Boy, am I scared.” Jane said this often. I rubbed her back low down on her spine. She was very restless. I wasn’t sure whether or not she’d let the tears come through. “I’ve got to put myself out, like I did the other night,” she said at 9:28. I wasn’t sure of what she meant by that. But it seemed that now she would try to shut off the crying, or sidetrack it, at this time. The charge, built up and/or saved since childhood, must be terrific. Ordinarily the crying would hurt me, but now, this time, I really wanted her to let it come through.

(9:46. I moved her back to the other table. The TV was turned up. “I’m trying so hard to get back over there,” Jane said, “in a certain fashion....”

(“Where you are,” she said cryptically. I thought she might be getting ready to erupt, but instead she sat finally with her face almost down to the tabletop. Then: “I’m safe here in the chair, but I’ve got to get back over there somehow.” She meant leaning to her left. But she was very restless. “All right, I’ll see what I can do this time.... I do it every morning—I’ll try to do it now,” she said, restlessly shifting from side to side in the chair. More and more I was concerned about getting her off her ass and into bed, but I was afraid to mention it yet. I turned off the television’s sound.

(10:01. Jane leaned so far to her left in the chair that I had to support her in it lest she overbalance the chair. She was still very restless. I thought the session was probably over.

(10:15. By now my wife had thrashed back and forth in her chair—not violently—telling me often that I had to help her; she certainly acted disoriented. “Don’t bother writing now,” she said, but when I stopped nothing came of it—no crying, or even talk. I moved her chair to the spot at which I sat at the card table, as she directed. A minute later I moved her back to her usual place at the dining room table, again as she directed. Silence. The movie on TV’s channel 2 was a bloody tale of youths being killed one by one by wicked, deranged men, near monsters, in dark summer woods.

(By 11 PM I’d moved Jane in her chair many times from position to position at each table. “Please, Bob, move me, move me, but don’t swing me so far out into the room, out in the middle like that....” But I had to, I explained, in order to be sure her chair legs cleared the table legs. Jane leaned far to her left again and again, yet didn’t topple over. Very gradually she seemed to calm down. There was a little shouting at me—very little—which I didn’t record, but no tears.

(The movements in the chair had to represent something in themselves—a shifting of attitudes—what else I wasn’t sure that quickly. Jane’s fear of being out in the center of the rug, away from a table she could lean on for support, could also represent her fears of abandonment, the casting away of old beliefs and fears. Often she insisted she knew what she was saying to me, but at times I felt that she didn’t, and even that some of it represented vocal dreaming. I did think that it was all therapeutic.

(I could see that her feet were badly swollen from all those hours—over 36—that she’d spent in her chair. So were her entire legs; the skin on them was stretched tight as a drumhead.

(Yet, five minutes later she was objecting when, in answer to her question about whether I had any suggestions, I repeated my goal to get her into bed. “Yes, I’ve got something to suggest—that you get off your ass and give your poor, poor body a rest,” I said, with some heat. “You can’t abuse the house you live in like that—your feet and legs are terribly swollen. What gives you the right to do that to your body?”

(Jane said little. She lay curled up almost like a fetus on her left side. It was after 1 AM before I got to bed. At 3 AM I was in to check up on her. At 6 AM she called me to get her up, and I rushed through the morning’s usual chores so that I could get started on typing this material. I put her in bed at about 11:30 AM, and got her up at noon. I’d made it clear after breakfast that she was to lay down for at least a short time each morning, as well as in the afternoon.

(I should add that I could easily identify with Jane’s feelings of panic. In lesser degree I used to get them when I rode the bus to work at Artistic Card Co. Sometimes on that morning ride I’d swear that I was having a heart attack, and would die any minute—most unpleasant—and excellent warning signs. I never did see a doctor.)