“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.

I think this book shows, then, that the ways toward health can and do vary tremendously. In some stubborn and psychically grounded way we each are going to make our own choices, as human beings always have. Surely Jane’s life shows this, and in ways that neither of us were even remotely aware of consciously when we married 42 years ago.

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.