“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The method of communication suits me temperamentally, and believe you me I can be temperamental. Somehow, to me at least, it seems that automatic writing could become like an institution. [...] Oftentimes they remind me of other things I would like to say.

However your unbounded enthusiasm this evening made me hesitate to disappoint you. [...] Incidentally, I rarely attend your little apartment unless in one way or another you ask me to, and tonight you were yelling my name from the rooftops, so to speak.

Because Ruburt deals in words it is easy for me to communicate in this manner. That is, Ruburt automatically translates inner data given by me into coherent, valid and faithful camouflage patterns, into words. [...]

(While she was in my studio telling me this, she received more:)

(From 3:47 to 3:57 Jane dictated this poem to me.

and speaking for me alone

known to me alone.

[...] But the thought came to me that the not-eating might be the body’s therapeutic fasting situation — it’s own natural version of it.”

[...] I felt so many emotions churning within me that I wondered just how I was supposed to express all of this love amid all of them. [...] Before the session I’d told Jane that I’d always felt that in our relationship my own contributions were doomed to fall short of what she wanted and expected from me —that I’d always felt I couldn’t give all she needed from a marriage partner. Those early feelings are still true to me, and now they’re wound up with my more recent feelings that it seems to be up to me to struggle to try to save Jane from herself. [...]

(To me this is like someone saying, “If you don’t love me I’ll get sick and stay sick.”)

(I told Jane the session made me furious. [...] “I feel so dumb, and now you’ll yell at me—”

(She talked about how a strong part of me had served as a catalyst in her own work and love, but this only made me wonder how I was to utilize those qualities in our relationship and work while ignoring all those other factors—mostly negative ones—that seemed to operate all the time. [...]

(Glaring at me, Larry shouted at me to get him a pie pan, that the washer was going to overflow the bucket any second. [...] The next I knew, Larry was very angry with me; he stood right beside me and towered over me, yelling something about me being some kind of nut or dope, and that I needed a good punch.

(Then my brother Dick, looking perhaps a little younger than he is now [about 36], was approaching me, smiling down at me and saying something to me. [...] This couple with Dick did not speak to me, as I recall.

[...] As he passed me he turned his head to look back at me over his left shoulder, smiling serenely all the while. [...] Father did not speak a word to me, nor did I speak to him or call after him. [...] This was the end of the dream, and it made quite an impression upon me.

[...] As I stood on the corner with people passing me in all directions, I stretched my arms high above my head. Then to my surprise I saw my father ride past me, past the corner, on a bicycle. [...] His face was very smooth-looking and pink-cheeked, looking very healthy, and he seemed to pedal past me quite easily, as a youth would do.

[...] “Read me — read me yesterday’s session. [...]

[...] Jane spoke to John, thanking him for looking after me. [...] I felt a surge of emotion, half unbelieving, when she told me. [...]

[...] Yet they had the Olympics on TV, and John offered me a scotch and soda. [...] Margaret asked me if I’d be an honorary pallbearer at Joe’s funeral, and I said sure. [...]

[...] “Don’t touch me,” she said as she lay on her back watching the TV soap opera, The Young and the Restless, as she did every noontime. [...]

(One thing caught me unprepared, and perhaps came close to interrupting the session. [...] I am not used to speaking so steadily, although Jane later said that she too had noticed a voice stain in her first session with me, until she became more relaxed and used to the idea. [...]

(Two additional points now recalled: When she began talking about Florida, Jane told me “I got scared in Florida”; she was also sure I would leave her when the job situation got so bad and things didn’t work out as we’d hoped they would. [I remember her telling me this in Marathon, when I returned to the trailer after driving out to get a job painting signs.]

(I had wanted to hypnotize Jane for some time, but had been hesitating even though my pendulum told me I had nothing against the idea. [...]

[...] I began to induce a general relaxation, following techniques I had read, and which Jane had used with me several years ago. [...]

[...] Seth talked about two men connected with me in the past in various ways; I would meet these men at the party. [...] They are friends, it developed, of Tom Hartley, a fact totally unknown and unexpected by me.

(Both men approached me at the party, at separate times, and introduced themselves; both recognized and called me by name; I did not recognize either of them. [...]

The next chapter will deal with your physical reality as it appears to me and others like me. [...]

[...] Yet not necessarily bald, Jane added, to me at the time. [...]

[...] This was news to me, also, for she had not told me about it. [...] Often a question or statement of mine, for instance, will remind her to tell me something. [...]

[...] (Pause.) Seth has told me that in some future, in your terms, he would help me in this regard; bringing me closer, he said, for a good look. [...]

[...] Although you do not find me as warmly personal as the Seth with whom (staring directly at me) you have been acquainted, I am a personality. [...]

[...] This effect still fools me at times, for a sentence will have ended whereas I think Jane has only paused briefly in the midst of one.

[...] I think me.”

[...] Do you understand me? [...]

[...] Right now this room doesn’t seem very real to me. [...]

[...] Answer me, will you? [...]

[...] Sharon told me that I did hear Teresa (“help me, help me.”) last night as I was leaving the hospital via the emergency room. [...]

(Jane said she’d go over the last few sessions and show me where she thinks the book started, but I said it was probably quite obvious. The thought of a new Seth book didn’t bother me. “It’s okay by me,” I said. [...]

[...] Maybe he didn’t want to tell me so I wouldn’t get upset about it. But when he says “comments” I figure he’s separating book material from stuff about me....” [...]

[...] “You’d better give me a Kleenex,” she said, and blew her nose after she’d finished the session. [...]

[...] She told me that Jane loved me, and that she was having “a better night.” [...] And the fact that my wife is having a better night may mean something, or not … I’d told her this afternoon that I’d been prepared to receive a call from the hospital at any time, telling me to get my ass down there because my wife was failing and the end was near. And Jane smiled and said that she’d been tempted many a time to have me called to come see her, especially late at night.

[...] Then a little later she told me to turn down the TV and get out my pad. [...]

meant for me alone.

waiting just for me.

Still, my experience enriches Seth Two, and his experiences enrich me to the extent that I am able to perceive and translate them for my own use. In the same way, Ruburt’s personality is expanded through relationship with me, and I also gain through the experience, as even the best of teachers learns from each dimension of activity.

In the gestalt of my personality, as in your terms I lived later richer lives, that woman was alive again in me — as, for example, the child is alive in the adult, and filled with gratitude comparing later circumstances to the earlier existences. She urged me to use my advantages better.

[...] Then she told me Seth was “around” and that the session would begin in a moment. [...]

[...] But in your terms, Seth Two is far further divorced from my reality than I am from Ruburt’s. You can imagine Seth Two as a future portion of me if you prefer, and yet far more is involved.

[...] Seth told me that it referred to my death as a medium in Boston in the last century. He had given us some information about this life in previous sessions, and now he told me that I wouldn’t again die of cancer (a mistake in tactics on his part, since he had long ago told me to give up cigarettes, and I haven’t complied. He has never tried to bully me into giving up the habit, merely saying that it didn’t help my overall health or development).

It sounds ridiculous, but I knew that this thing was “out to get me.” [...] I didn’t have time to wonder, because it bit me several times on the hand. It was amazingly oppressive, and kept up its efforts to drag me farther away from my body into the bedroom closet.

[...] Something made me look up. A young man was looking at me with a pleased, cat-caught-the-canary grin. He was one of the clerks, and I saw now that most of the clerks were quite young, and they were watching me.

[...] Seth says that he has personally assisted me in some of my own projection experiments, but that I have not been aware of his assistance. [...] Later the people involved told me that they dreamed that Seth was speaking to them through me on the same nights as my experiences. [...]

[...] In Chapter Nine of The Seth Material (1970) she wrote: “Several people have told me that Seth communicated with them through automatic writing, but Seth denies any such contacts, saying that his communications will be limited to his work with me, in order that the integrity of the Seth Material be preserved.” And in her introduction to Seth Speaks (1972), she quoted Seth from the 510th session for January 19, 1970: “While my communications will come exclusively through Ruburt (Jane) at all times, to protect the integrity of the material, I will invite the reader to become aware of me as a personality….”

Doctors had terrified me as a child, when my mother was already bedridden with arthritis, and when I was diagnosed as having an overactive thyroid gland—an affliction that could lead, so my mother told me, to insanity and death. [...]

[...] As he has said so many times, Seth speaks only through me, to protect the integrity of the material. And it is indeed that contract between him and me that always assures you of the authenticity of Seth’s work.

(9:10.) Seth couldn’t lead my life for me, of course. [...]

(She had a very restless night and called me several times. [...] I was groggy, but asked her to tell me what she meant when she said she’d come up with some good insights from the evening before. What she explained to me in briefer form is related below. [...]

In any case, she wanted Dr. Sobel to look me over Friday (tomorrow at 2:45 pm). [...] So taking a drug to prevent such a future development seemed the better side of wisdom to her—but not to me, not to Rob. [...]

(9:44.) That summer also seemed to be a time of crisis, as Rob pressed me, it certainly seemed to me, to seek medical attention. [...]

[...] No need to go into details here, but it ended up with Jane asking me to get the notebook of sinful-self material. [...]

[...] But even though I think telepathy is possible … I can’t quite believe that in a trance state, through me, another personality read someone else’s mind — that’s it!” I said. [...] And that made me question if I was really far more disturbed than I think I was because you didn’t help with Miss Cunningham the other night. [...] Have a secondary personality give you the dickens over it — and in front of company — with me supposedly in the clear, taking no responsibility for it at all.”

[...] He has achieved a state in which he can receive inner data from me more readily. But beyond that, he is now able in some small way to contact me. That is, I have contacted you in the past, and now he is gaining the ability to contact me.

[...] “Like me, in the Denmark life you told me about?”

[...] Yet Rob always managed to help me see things in perspective, and this time, he again helped me maintain faith in myself and my abilities.

The next chapter will deal with your physical reality as it appears to me and others like me. [...]

[...] As a whole it was completely new to me, though each word had been spoken through my lips, and I had devoted many evenings in trance to its production. This was particularly strange to me since I am a writer myself, used to organizing my own material, keeping track of it, and hovering over it like a mother hen.

[...] Seth dictated the book through me, speaking through my lips. The creative work was so distant from me, that in this respect I could not call the product my own. [...]

[...] I feel his mood and vitality clearly, though they are not directed at me, but to whomever Seth is addressing at the moment. I feel them as they pass through me.

In other words, my poetry finally revealed to me my state of mind before “Idea Construction” and Seth. Little by little, using it as a guide, other memories came back to me — all trivial in comparison to real tragedy and yet, to me, bitterly depressing. The death of a kitten that year led me to write:

I was untouched ten years ago,
By love and even pain.
The world touched me or touched me not.
To me it was the same.

[...] This present book, devoted to dreams and subjective experience, led me into deeper self-examination. [...] And it was through reading this old poetry that I found clues that showed me the points of continuity between my life before my psychic initiation and after it.

[...] When you see the type of poetry that I was writing then, you will understand immediately why the ideas in “Idea Construction” were such a revelation to me. [...] It never occurred to me that my own attitudes had anything to do with it.

To me, my demands are simple. [...] Show me you do not need a policeman, that if I let go you will not slide away from your goals. [...] In negotiating with me you negotiate with yourselves. [...]

All right (Jane said), call me the creator, this part of me that’s talking. [...]

My demands, to me, are simple and reasonable. [...] All you have to do to please me is work a reasonable amount of hours daily; then I do not care what you do, but I expect that purpose to govern and direct your lives to be the focus about which all other events happen, not a sideline.

(We talked briefly after a late supper.While washing up, Jane told me after she was finished, she “got” that she was worse in Key West because she should have stayed here and worked today. [...]

(My back was beginning to bother me this morning, at around 11:00, so I sat in my chair, in the studio, and closing my eyes began to use the induction technique that Jane had used on me in our previous sessions. [...]

[...] I kept my eyes closed from the start, but midway in the session felt that I could not have opened them, at least very easily [re Jane’s suggestions when she is putting me under].

(There followed a very confusing [and to me upsetting] several hours during which Jane and our neighbor, Leonard Yaudes, tried contacting Miss Callahan’s doctor, her relatives, her friends, our landlady, and a hospital. [...]

[...] Finally, when Jane was talking to me in the studio at about 10:45, I had such a severe attack of cramps in the back I could not stand.