“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Our lives, I’ve learned, don’t simply proceed nicely and directly from “birth” to “death.” Instead, I see each one of us as traveling a most curious and branching-out or circuitous route, one that is creative in ways that are both known and, I’m sure now, unknown.

Ah, there’s the challenge, then — to understand our inherent creativity. We can try to mold it, to make it conform or behave, but each life has a life of its own. How fortunate! My wife’s life and work show that we can even create challenges and goals before birth, then in physical life plunge into fulfilling those qualities as we don flesh and clothing and beliefs. Yet what great, unexpected convolutions we can encounter in those challenges we’ve created! Even so, I think, ultimately we come to understand, whether on conscious or unconscious levels — or both — that we were utterly ourselves while learning along the way.

Jane died in the hospital at 2:08 a.m. on Wednesday, September 5, 1984, after being there, quite helpless in certain ways, for a year and nine months. It was the third time she’d been hospitalized since February 1982. Since her death many have written to both sympathize and to ask “Why?” She had Seth, didn’t she — for whom she spoke for some 21 years; she also produced six books with him along the way (plus a number of books on her “own”). Why hadn’t Seth gotten her out of her dilemma, turned the magic key in the proper psychic lock? She was only 55 years old when she died. She could have lived for another 20 years, say, and contributed even more to our knowledge, both with Seth and by herself. She could have become world famous had she chosen to go that route.

When Jane began delivering the Seth material in 1963, I became very conscious of the record we’d leave, not with Seth but concerning our private lives. The one can’t help but add to the other, increasing the marvelous complexity of both. Long ago I came to believe that nothing exists in isolation; to omit some of the record leaves gaps, obviously. Hardly an original idea, yet one that I often see ignored in the surface activities of our daily lives. Other facets of our physical and nonphysical lives could help us tremendously if more conscious attention was given to them, regardless of “when” they happened.