“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The Way Toward Health is more than an account of the stay — and death — of my wife, Jane Roberts, in a hospital in Elmira, New York, just 13 years ago. I’ve long wanted to see it published while feeling, knowing, that it has much else to offer, too. Not only about Jane’s fine ability to speak in a trance or dissociated state for Seth, that “energy personality essence,” as he calls himself, but about all of the vastly complicated challenges that can, and do, arise in the course of a human life.

During those 21 months in the hospital, Jane, Seth, and I said much about her physical/psychic condition, and I recorded it all in my homemade shorthand as best I could under often very stressful conditions. In all that time I missed spending up to six or more hours a day with my wife only once, because of a heavy snowstorm. For weeks after her admittance in April, I didn’t know if Jane would ever do any “psychic” work again, but three months later she surprised me by beginning a series of dialogues similar to the “world-view” material she’d produced for her books on the psychologist and philosopher William James, and the artist Paul Cézanne. Once again, she was inspired by my questions on art and related matters. “At least I feel I’m doing something I’m made for,” she said when starting the new project. She concluded it in September 1983, then over the next four months delivered a series of 71 mostly short, mostly personal Seth sessions. She finished that series on January 2, 1984 — and began The Way Toward Health the next day.

During all of this time, we told no one in the hospital what we were specifically doing — staff accepted our conventional explanation that we were writers and “just working.” It all worked very well, even when we were often interrupted, as the sessions show.

Inevitably, however, much had to be omitted from The Way Toward Health as it’s presented here — not Seth’s material, but from Jane’s and my work and notes. I owe a great deal to the very considerate help of Janet Mills, the proprietor of Amber-Allen Publishing. We saw that if all of the peripheral material for each session was included, the book would be very long. (I had a number of personal experiences and insights that I thought enhanced concepts of the Seth material, for example.) But what to cut, when to stop? This presented a dilemma for me.

But how can we — how can anyone — bring more of our inherent knowledge to consciousness, to use? How can we become more keenly aware of the facts and implications of our dreams, for example, and the very great influences they exert in our lives? Often our dreams are doorways to other realities. Yet I know that we’re delving ever more deeply into our psyches; Jane’s work with Seth, as well as her poetry and other writings, show that. The great gifts of our psyches are all there, waiting …