“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After a pause at 12:02, Seth delivered a page of material for Jane before ending the session at 12:16 A.M. As I interpret his information on the photographs, then, Jane’s depicts an individual who was to become a probable Jane to the one I know, while mine is pretty much an early version of the self who’s always lived in this reality …)

(The photograph of Jane is 33 years old. It was taken by an older lady friend who was treating her to an outing at a spa just outside of the New York State resort of Saratoga Springs, where Jane lived with her bedridden mother, Marie, and a housekeeper. In a childish hand Jane had scrawled her friend’s name on the back of the picture, along with the date. Many years later she was to tell me, “My mother hated that woman.” In the snapshot it’s a sunlit day in August, 1941. Jane is 12 years old. She sits on the grass before some evergreen shrubs; she leans slightly back on her right hand, her bare legs rather primly folded. She wears a print dress that had been given to her in the Roman Catholic orphanage in Troy, some 35 miles from Saratoga Springs; she’d spent the previous 18 months there in the institution while her mother had been hospitalized in another city for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Jane also wears a short-sleeved pullover sweater. Her mother had knitted it during her stay in the hospital.

(To me, both photographs had a certain mysterious quality that I’d often found intriguing — an aura due partly to their being old, personal, and so irreplaceable, I suppose. But for a long time I’d been aware of other feelings connected with them. Jane had begun delivering the Seth material late in 1963, and soon afterwards Seth started developing his ideas on probabilities.¹ Many times while looking at the snapshots since then I’d found myself speculating about the probable realities surrounding their two young subjects. I told Jane now that I understood the course of action each of us had chosen to make physical, or “real” in our terms. But what of all the other paths our probable selves had embarked upon since those pictures had been taken? By now, did those photographs actually depict the immature images of us, the Jane and Rob we knew and had always been, or from our standpoint did they show a probable Jane, a probable Rob — two individuals who long ago had set out upon their own journeys through other realities? I wasn’t clear on what I wanted to know, and had trouble expressing myself to Jane. Maybe I just wanted Seth to comment on probabilities in a more personal way. [And added later: At the time, I had no idea that my questioning would trigger a new Seth book.²]

He was always highly imaginative, as was his mother. His mother was socially defiant, flaunting her beauty with the “disreputable” elements of society. Much later, Ruburt would date the “disreputable” men in his environment, yet neither mother or daughter saw that parallel. Ruburt’s mother by then wanted a respectable, hopefully rich husband for Ruburt, and could not understand why he chose men who did not conform.

(Even so, through her school years Jane didn’t particularly talk about her thoughts, or the abilities she sensed within herself — not with her mother, the priests she came to know well [and who didn’t approve in any case if she carried her religious devotion, her mysticism, “too far”], or even with her grandfather. [...]