“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt provided himself with a background in which a parent (Jane’s mother) was steadily, chronically ill,³² and in which the medical profession with its beliefs was in constant sight. His mother was not medically neglected. His background included far more than sickness and the medical profession, however, but Ruburt knew that the conventional medical framework was not the answer to human ills. As you became more and more incapacitated, the trigger was set to find another solution. Psychic structures interweave, and realities do, one through the other (as Jane had written a few hours before the session).

By then I’d lost many months from my job as a commercial artist, which was work I’d returned to several years earlier to help ease our financial pressures. I was 44 years old — and, as I recognized after the sessions began, at a point in life where I greatly needed more penetrating insights into the meaning of existence. So did Jane, even though she was almost 10 years younger. As the sessions became part of our joint reality, we gradually came to understand that the illness I struggled with was a disguised expression of rebellion for both of us. We were very dissatisfied with our status quo: After years of work, Jane had managed to publish but a few poems and a few pieces of science fantasy (several short stories and two brief novels), and in my own view I wasn’t making it as the kind of artist I wanted to be. We were driven to know more — about art, about writing, about the human condition, about everything. My own need, as well as Jane’s, struck deep responses within her psyche.

32. In Volume 1, see Session 679 (with its Note 4, among others) for material on Jane’s early years with her mother. I often remind myself that from her earliest years Jane lived in an atmosphere permeated by the fact of illness, while by contrast my background in that respect was much more ordinary. Growing up, she was “frightened most of the time,” Jane told me as I prepared this note: She often lived alone with her bedridden mother, such periods being punctuated by a succession of itinerant housekeepers appointed by the welfare department. She soon became strongly imprinted by human frailty and vulnerability.