“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is much I have not told you about your city, for you will have to discover it for yourselves. I am merely encouraging you to focus your joint energies in that direction … You will be dealing with symbols, yet you will learn that symbols are reality, for you are symbols of yourselves that live and speak. You do not think of yourselves as symbols [but] there is no symbol that does not have its individual life.

(With a smile:) My personality, as it so richly presents itself, is (louder) to some extent a joint creation of the two of you. This does not mean that I do not have my own reality, for I do, but in my relationship with you and Ruburt, and with your world, I do take certain characteristics that come from each of your realities.

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.