“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

Some of this throws light on current experience. The religious background was there. At his preference and demand, he changed from a public to a Catholic school after the third grade.⁴ This was against his mother’s judgment. She felt that public schools were better and more socially beneficial. Ruburt, at that age — when he changed at the third grade — had quite a will then, in that he forced his mother to acquiesce to the change of schools. He put up such a fuss, Ruburt, and held such temper tantrums, that permission was given. He was stubborn even then.

Ruburt chose a background in which he was poor, as did the mother. The mother was also bright, but chose to bank upon beauty for escape (from her environment). Ruburt tried his brains instead. That material has been given (over the years in a series of personal sessions).

(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. [...]