“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The three of us got along well as children, although our natures and interests varied considerably. All of us went through grade school and high school in Sayre, a railroad town in northeastern Pennsylvania: Our father settled his family there in 1923 when he opened an auto-repair and battery shop. The separations in the family began to happen after Linden and I graduated from high school, left Sayre, and started to work our respective ways through college and an art school. Then came long periods of military service for the three of us (World War II for Linden and me). Years passed before I understood how much my parents had been affected by the departure of their children.

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.

The abilities that he possessed, that could be channeled into society as he understood it, were [so handled]. In such an eventuality, fragmentation occurred so that the abilities were dispersed, some directed into school, some into drawing, and others into his models. Those creative attributes were separated so that they could be safely handled, yet expressed to some degree, and not completely denied.

Eventually Jane’s grandfather, Joseph Burdo, with whom she shared a deep mystical identification, was unable to support two extra people, and the family had to rely upon public assistance. Jane’s grandmother was killed in an automobile accident in 1936. The next year, her grandfather moved out of the house. By then Marie was partially incapacitated, and the Welfare Department began to furnish mother and daughter with occasional (and often unreliable) domestic help. Thus, Jane was 9 years old in 1938, when she changed schools after finishing the third grade.

[...] And she had reinforced that framework by demanding her transfer from a public to a Catholic grade school.

(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. [...]

[...] I’ve looked everywhere …” But her friends in school asked her to write love poems for their “crushes” of the moment.