“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

September 20, 2002. How strange, I found myself thinking as I prepared to write this introduction, that 37 years would pass before I’d start publishing this series of personal sessions and excerpts that had been dictated by my wife, Jane Roberts, for Seth, the “energy personality essence” she spoke for while in a trance state.

Obviously, this introduction will be incomplete. It will also be rather unorthodox—more like a series of conscious and unconscious reminiscences and free associations, moving back and forth in time as I approach sets of ideas from various angles while seeking to learn more about my wife even now, 18 years after her death. Jane’s death may have been physical, yet she still lives, still offers insights, still makes me reach to understand and grow as I mourn her passing. She died at the age of 55. What more could she have accomplished in our camouflage reality had she chosen to live physically for, say, even another decade? Wonderfully penetrating things, I’m sure—and I believe that she is indeed doing so, “where she is now.”

I add that none of those books stress reincarnation, or any claims that Jane or I (or both of us) had or have psychic relationships with any one of that celebrated trio. My wife simply knew how interested I was in those very creative individuals. I still am. I know I’m in good company with the many who have been and who are nourished by their works. One personal example: for many years I carried a beat-up old paperback edition of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience beside me on the front seat of my old Ford Taurus. Without conceit, I also feel that the works, the ideas, of those three are in their own ways reminiscent of the Seth material. (I don’t believe it would ever have occurred to Jane to make a statement like that!)

But first: One day in late November 1963, Jane sat at her writing table in the living room while I left to paint in my studio at the back of the apartment. We often followed this routine when we didn’t have to be out of the house. My wife liked to tune into a radio station that featured classical music while she worked; she kept its volume low enough so that it didn’t bother me. After some time on that particular day I realized that all was quiet—too quiet—out there in the living room. When I went out to see what Jane was up to I was greeted with her breakthrough accomplishment—one that, to put it mildly, was to lead to very unexpected challenges and growths in our lives: Jane held up a sheaf of typewriter paper upon which she had scribbled in large handwriting an essay that had come to her as fast as she could write it down: The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. She didn’t know where the work had come from, how she had produced it. She’d felt as though she was out of her body some of the time, out on the first floor’s porch roof looking in at herself. “What does it mean?” she asked as we discussed it. She was exhilarated, intrigued, cautious, wondering about its ideas—that basically each one of us creates our own reality in the most intimate terms, for example.

We’d borrowed the board from our landlord, James Spaziani, who hadn’t had any success using it with his family. He was to later just give us the board. Jimmy (long deceased) was a kind and outgoing landlord and restaurateur who lived with his wife and three children on the second floor of the old converted horse barn and carriage house in back of the apartment house he owned at 458 West Water Street, where Jane and I lived. He also owned a well-known dine-and-dance establishment in Elmira, Lib’s Supper Club, which my wife and I frequented before the onset of her symptoms. Jimmy was the chief cook at Lib’s. Busy as he was, he always welcomed us when we stepped into his kitchen to say hello.

At the board, my wife clumsily reached a personality named Frank Watts, an American schoolteacher who told us he’d died in 1931. He gave us very brief, halting and sometimes disconnected answers during our first three board sessions. Yet in that third session Frank Watts told us that Jane had “Too much aggression.” That she had been a “Medium.” in a previous life, that her present “Timidity has roots of rage.” from “Previous hates unresolved.” that she “Must conquer now.” When I asked Frank Watts about those unresolved hates, he replied “No information direct permitted.”

Would Seth have cooperated in such a venture? It didn’t occur to Jane and me to even ask. We moved beyond Frank Watts’s “Timidity has roots of rage.” Seth announced his presence in the next, fourth, session: “I prefer not to be called Frank Watts. That personality was rather collarless (as spelled out on the board).” Also: “I was Frank Watts to learn humility.” So with our obvious consent and the great variety of his very intelligent and fluent discourses, Seth became the discarnate entity who spoke through Jane for the next 20 years and eight months. That “energy personality essence” did his best, always honestly, I’m sure, to help my wife, both as far as he was able to but also, as I came to believe, as far as he was allowed to. Not only because of Jane’s intense early fears in this lifetime, I felt, but also because of past lives, as Frank Watts had indicated. How unusual, I thought as I recorded the sessions in my homemade shorthand, that the conflicts displayed between the two main portions of her immensely creative personality were so open, even while she had the potential to help so many others. And did. Jane was living her challenges just like each one of us does, and her efforts were inextricably bound up with the world even as, I was sure, we were creating our human versions of the earth and its own reality. This taught us that even with Jane’s talents there was more, always more, to create and to learn from. How exciting and frustrating at the same time! In all modesty, there seemed to be much that we could do, feel, want, offer to others. Our mail alone began to speak written volumes, almost always approvingly, that we had never anticipated. How could we have known that would happen? As with other details of our experiences to come, many were still unknown to us on conscious levels—we’d have been incredibly wise to have known it all in advance! Like each one of us, Jane as a physical creature still had to travel her literal paths to experience and knowledge.

Given our situation, I took care of my wife as best I could. As the years passed our lives became more and more restricted physically. It became increasingly difficult for Jane to walk in public. When we went food shopping, for example, she would sit in the car in the parking lot, perhaps reading, while I pushed the grocery cart up and down the aisles. We gradually gave up on vacations, in the usual sense of traveling. Strangely, the traveling aspect of the symptoms bothered us the least: we were too immersed in our daily lives with either full-time or part-time jobs (in the beginning), but always with writing, painting, the Seth material, ESP class, seeing friends, and so forth. Jane did conduct several quite successful long-distance experiments with the Gallaghers when they vacationed in the Caribbean Islands. We made dated notes and times of her impressions so she could check them when our friends returned. Interpreting the impressions was sometimes quite difficult. Jane did have direct hits listed, but for other impressions Peg and Bill couldn’t agree on the accuracy and/or timing of certain activities. And sometimes they said the impressions were just wrong.

Reading these private sessions, one can legitimately ask: “Well, if Jane Roberts was so smart and Seth was so great with all of that personal stuff, why did she come down with the symptoms to begin with? Why couldn’t he cure her, or at least help her?” My answer right here is that those questions were and still are answered to the best of the abilities of Jane, Seth, and myself in these private sessions, even while I keep in mind Frank Watts’s references to Jane’s “Timidity has roots of rage.” from “Previous hates unresolved.” These sessions will detail in many ways and times why my beloved wife, even with all of her creative dedication to her chosen path, ended up with what finally came to be her intractable physical impairments. Part of the answer, as I’ve already noted, is that because of her strong fears from early childhood on, Jane did not allow Seth to tell us all he could have. Not that she was consciously aware of why she refused, and not that the elimination of that barrier alone would have magically wiped away the challenges the two of us were creating. But again and again I felt, I knew, that reincarnational factors were involved, concerning not only Jane, Seth, and me, but a number of other “past” personalities and influences from any of the three of us, and in various camouflage time frames. And what about that influence from the “future,” since Seth maintained that all is now? I didn’t berate Jane to open up more psychically. I saw her struggles (and had plenty of my own). I sensed walls, barriers, and complications there. Some of them arose from the very uniqueness of her position. After all, here she was, speaking in trance for a personality who told us he’d last lived on Earth in Denmark 300 years ago—even if there is no such thing as time!

In 1931 in Saratoga Springs, New York, Jane’s father, Delmer Roberts (or Del) chose to exercise the probability that he would leave his wife Marie and their daughter Jane, who was not yet three years old. Marie’s mother, Mary Finn, called Minnie, lived with the family and often served as Jane’s nanny. Jane was a second child following her mother’s earlier miscarriage. Already Marie was showing signs of arthritis. Jane and I came to believe that it was hardly accidental that her mother quickly became bedridden—for life—following the departure of her husband. Minnie Finn was killed by a hit-and-run speeding motorist one icy winter day on her way to the corner store to buy the young girl some shredded wheat for supper—a tragedy that Marie never stopped blaming her daughter for. The two went on welfare. A series of housekeepers, of varying abilities and temperaments and staying powers, were provided for them over the early years. The young Jane spent almost two years in a Catholic orphanage for women while her mother was hospitalized. Some of the housekeepers had been—and some still were—prostitutes, Jane told me. They took care of Marie’s physical needs—tasks that in her later teens Jane would often take care of herself. With welfare’s help Marie set up a telephone answering service for local doctors that she ran from her bed. The two women’s Catholicism became even stricter: it was often bolstered by the head of the local church coming to Sunday dinner at the old two-family house at 92 Middle Avenue, in one of the lower-income sections of Saratoga Springs.

A strong saving grace in all of the personal and household turmoil she lived in, Jane told me often, was her relationship with her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo, her “Little Daddy,” as she called him because of his diminutive size. Even as a youngster she had been well aware that she felt psychically connected to him. Joseph Burdo had become estranged from his wife, Minnie Finn, long ago. He was a man of few words, yet he nurtured in his granddaughter a love of nature that she was to cherish for the rest of her life. In Appendix 1, Volume 1 of The “Unknown” Reality, published in 1977, I partially quote Seth as saying that Joseph Burdo was “Part of a very strong entity. However, extremely inarticulate in his last life, due to an inability to synthesize gains in past lives… That is, in his feeling of unity with All That Is, he excluded other human beings....” He lived alone in rented rooms and worked at various jobs in town; he was a doorman, a watchman. He drank and gambled at the local casinos and played the horses at Saratoga Springs’ famous racetrack. He took Jane on walks in the nearby woods. “When he spoke of the wind,” Seth remarked, “she felt like the wind, as any child will unselfconsciously identify with the elements.” He died in 1949 at 68, when Jane was 20 years old.

A note about how the “past, present and future” evolved and combined in an unexpected way within Seth’s concept of simultaneous time. Jane divorced Walter Zeh in 1954, and published Seth Speaks in 1972 and Personal Reality in 1974. She died in 1984. During all of that time we had no communication with Walt, as might be expected, although we often talked about him and wished him well. Yet a year or so after Jane’s death Walt wrote to me, and we began a most interesting correspondence although we were never to meet. Walt gave me background information about Jane’s history, and his own, and the welcome news that he had married again and fathered several children. For many years he worked for the New York State government in Albany. His passion was railroading, and after his retirement he and his wife traveled extensively by rail.

I packed my suitcase and art materials the day before I was to leave Sayre. At suppertime that night I received a telephone call from Ed Robbins, an old friend I’d gone to art school with in Brooklyn, New York before World War II. The results flowing from that call, which was so of-the-moment, were to change my life forever—and Jane’s too! Ed offered me a job as an artist in his upstate hometown of Schuylerville, some 11 miles east of Saratoga Springs and on the Hudson River. He was writing and drawing the Mike Hammer daily and Sunday comic strips for his friend, Mickey Spillane, and was having trouble meeting those remorseless weekly deadlines for the syndicate that distributed the feature to newspapers coast to coast. Ed knew I’d done comic-book work: would I be interested in helping him get his strips to the syndicate on time? The pay would be good. I could live with him and his wife Ella and their children until I found a place for myself if our arrangement worked out.

And so the first time I met my wife-to-be I heard her but didn’t really see her....

I never saw my wife blame Seth because she had her symptoms, nor did I ever refuse to help her hold the sessions until she got rid of them. Almost unconsciously, it seemed, the three of us were committed to creative growth in spite of all obstacles, whatever their cause or nature, or the amount of camouflage time involved.

It was no accident, Jane and I often said, that we were so quickly attracted to each other. Not only because of our simple love for one another and our mutual interests—but even then, I came to understand, because we could intuitively sense the fine creative adventure in consciousness that was to become the Seth material. (We didn’t give a thought, however, to anything like reincarnation, let alone to such connections involving us.) Even now, 18 years after Jane’s death in l984, I’m as committed to our work as ever. I have no reasons or motivations to present myself as being really cautious or asking my wife to be careful as she began to unleash the great flow of creativity that was to follow. I welcomed it after my first hesitance at accepting her themes in Idea Construction, and as it created its many-faceted path through our lives. On November 26, 1963, when Jane and I received those first incoherent “messages” on a borrowed Ouija board, our world views began to change, to enlarge. And more and more the Seth material became as deeply intertwined with my visual art as it did with Jane’s written art.

Nor did I brush aside my deep concerns about her symptoms because of the excitement stemming from the appearance, then the steady growth and complexity, of the sessions. Instead we became involved in a long process of trying to understand my wife’s impairments as they fluctuated over the years, and then finally did not leave her completely at all. Seth told us a number of times that Jane did not have arthritis, like her mother Marie did, but had instead started to develop deep self-protective defense mechanisms at an early age as a result of her chaotic and fatherless upbringing.

Pardon me for using the phrase every so often, but as the years passed and after her two very brief stays in Elmira’s St. Joseph’s hospital, Jane finally came to be deeply skeptical of the value of conventional medical help. It hadn’t helped when it was offered. The connections involving her mother’s bedridden condition and her tempestuous temper, including her suicide attempts, both faked and real, troubles with a succession of housekeepers, the lack of a father, the almost two years she spent in a Catholic orphanage while Marie was hospitalized, the death of her beloved grandfather, the whole strained atmosphere within which the gifted and impressionable child was growing, as well as her conflicts with church dogma and personalities, had, all together, powerful effects indeed. Neighbors tried to help. One gifted Jane with a male dog—a Sheltie—from the city pound. Jane named that loving young creature Mischa, and he was to offer her great comfort for years, just as he did to me when later we met. And I learned that the symptoms were not only a possibility that was native within my wife, but were to become corrosively alive within her all of those years later. Jane took me to meet her mother in the old double house on Middle Avenue three times. The first time, Marie cursed me from her bed; the next two times she ignored me.

Jane and I were married on December 27, 1954 at the home of my younger brother Loren and his wife Betts in Tunkhannock, PA, some 55 miles south of Sayre. Betts’s father, Leonard Meeker, who was a Methodist minister, performed the ceremony. In his later years my father, Robert Sr., had trained himself to become an excellent professional photographer. As a wedding present he created an album of the ceremony that Jane and I treasured. I still do. We rented an apartment in Sayre. I painted signs, then designed clothing labels for a printing plant there, and painted and wrote on weekends.

And guess what: I finally understood as Jane’s symptoms began to slowly grow that her choices were her right, and stopped my innuendos that it was perfectly all right for her to be open to outside help—so why wasn’t she? Seth was way ahead of me. I don’t recall that worthy ever suggesting to my wife outright that she seek medical help, let alone insisting that she do so. Was this because Jane wouldn’t allow him to say that, even if he wanted to? As noted, at times I’d felt that that was the case. It’s easy to proclaim that we human beings live short of our potentials in those terms—for if such potentials didn’t exist, how could we sense or aspire to them? But I’m hardly being original when I insist that each life is so intensely real that it seems most difficult to truly believe that we can have it any other way—let alone have more than one! Our challenges in this physical/nonphysical existence reign supreme, regardless of other possible long-term influences like reincarnation or time travel, for example. Or—yes—even religion: a subject I would like to explore in depth if ever I can create the several years of camouflage time necessary to do so. So even if Seth did help, still Jane chose to live her own life within the face and force of her own very creative present personality. Seth did offer insights, excellent ones of certain very creative depths that we more than welcomed, while all the time being quite aware, I think, that the beautiful young woman through whom he spoke—who let him speak—had her own agenda at the same time. And even though we agreed with Seth’s reincarnational material involving the three of us, and our families, still it was also intensely personal for my wife in this life that she go her own way.

As I’ve written, Jane’s two short and fruitless stays in the hospital had left her deeply skeptical about the value of conventional medical treatment in her case. She was still most reluctant to return to St. Joseph’s, but when her symptoms became so severe that I could no longer care for her at 1730 she went back into the hospital in April 1983. For the last time. For one year and 9 months until her death. In all of that camouflage time I missed spending several hours a day with her in room 330 just once. The Elmira area was hit by more than a foot of snow. I couldn’t get my car out of the garage; the streets weren’t plowed, businesses remained closed. Radio bulletins advised all except emergency workers to stay home. I couldn’t get through to my wife by telephone. Sometimes I would call her late at night to offer reassurance.

The checks kept arriving as Jane’s health very slowly cotinued to deteriorate even with all of our creative activities in 330. As the months passed I became more and more consciously caught up in the signs of her approaching physical death. See the final sessions and notes in The Way Toward Health, which I published in 1997, 13 years after her passing. Questions? There was no end to them, and there still isn’t. Like, why had I stayed way later than usual on the night of her death—so late that I fell asleep in my chair beside her bed after she had fallen asleep? Usually I left 330 before 10 PM. When at last I startled awake, Jane had died, at an estimated 2:08 AM on Wednesday, September 5, 1984. How did my dear wife react, feel, at the moment of her death? In the minute AFTER her death? How did Seth respond in those same fleeting intervals? How did the two of them greet each other, and perhaps join? Had he spoken with me after those precious first moments, could Seth have given me information that Jane, for whatever reasons, hadn’t wanted us to acquire from or through him? Did Jane, did Seth, watch me make the two pen-and-ink drawings of my beautiful wife as she lay so quietly in her bed, at peace at last? (I still plan to do paintings based on that art.)

Periodically, after answering the mail, I add it to the archives of the Seth material at Yale University Library as an integral part, a reinforcement, say, of Jane’s great body of work. It’s well preserved there. I speculate that eventually someone may write a book showing the great variety of reader reactions to the Seth material. It would—and will—be a vital addition to the work my wife began, and so help perpetuate it. Producing such a loving compendium would require much study. And a continuing one, as long as more mail arrives....

Finally, then: I was working on this introduction late in October 2002 when Laurel and I were visited by five members of the Houston, Texas, Seth group: Winter Calvert, Theresa Smith, Jim and Debbie Serra, and Yvette Silva. I had corresponded with a few members of the group, and Jim and his wife had visited me some time ago. The five were accompanied by Richie Kendall; he’s an old friend from the days of Jane’s ESP class—one of the New York City boys, as Jane used to fondly refer to that group. Richie had also visited Laurel and me twice last summer with Mary Dillman from his new residence in Westport, Connecticut.

Mary Dillman, a volunteer, works with and cares for the collection at the library. She has been, and is, a great help in organizing that mass of material, coordinating and computerizing it for researchers in a number of interesting ways that Jane and I hadn’t thought of doing “way back when” my wife was delivering the sessions. Ways that, indeed, wouldn’t have been possible even if we’d had the camouflage time to carry them out in those long-ago days. The blinding speed and depth of association via modern technology simply hadn’t existed.

Actually, Laurel and I drive past 458 often, without paying much attention to it on our way from Sayre to the hill house. But now we were there on its grounds, focusing upon that precious symbol where Jane and I had lived for 15 years. I hadn’t set foot in 458 since the day we’d moved to the hill house 27 years ago. Incredible! Already, as I pushed open the heavy front door for the six of us, I felt like an intruder, that my footsteps were stirring up the past. We tramped noisily up the narrow and turning stairs to face a fire door guarding the second floor. Past that, we were in the narrow hall that led to a similar door guarding a stairwell at the back of the building. The hall was much shorter and gloomier than I remembered it to be. The sounds of our voices were crowded; the space we stood in seemed to be so confining, with the doors at each end, that I marveled that my dear wife and I had lived in the house for all that time. Apartments 4 and 5, the ones Jane and I had rented (we could afford only Apartment 5 for the first several years) opened off each side of the hall. Apartment 4 was empty; its door was on a short chain that let me push it open a bit to peek into a now-deserted living room that Jane and I had known so well.

The Butts family does have a bit of history in Elmira, though. Here are a few clues for anyone even remotely interested. In the last two decades of the 1800s my grandfather Otis and his wife raised four children on their farm in Wellsboro, PA, a farming community some 50 miles from Elmira, New York. At the age of 15 my father, Robert Sr., followed his three older siblings, Jay and Ernest and Ella, in leaving the farm. All did well, each in his and her way. Ernest left the northeast and never married. After Jay and Ella had each married they settled in Elmira. Jay and his wife had children. My father married Estelle (Stell) in Newark, NJ in 1917, and I was born two years later in Mansfield, a small community near Wellsboro.

John “settled down” eventually; he lives with his wife and children in Seattle, Washington. I saw him once several years later when he visited his mother. He was immensely proud to show me his very young first son. His mother Margaret retired to Florida after the death of her husband Joe. We still keep in touch. I’ll always treasure her exceptional kindnesses to me during Jane’s long and final hospital stay.

That night in Sayre, and the next day, Laurel mentioned her near encounter with the hawk or eagle several times before we finally got down to really discussing what had happened at 1730. I drew a crude map of the house and its grounds as seen from above. The front of the house, facing Pinnacle Road, cannot be seen from where all of us were standing in the driveway to the side and in back of it. On the map Laurel showed me how the bird had suddenly zoomed into view low over the house from Pinnacle Road, and then flown even lower toward the two women near the back of the second car in the driveway. Laurel exclaimed now about the bird’s enormous wingspan as it had seemed to fly right at her. It had made no sound except for the rush of air through its wings. Obviously my wife hadn’t been prepared for its seemingly friendly behavior.

On Sunday we went out to breakfast, and then went to some of the Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain historical sites. (I am a student of mediumship, as well as a reader of and believer in the Seth material. Mark Twain and his wife [as well as Jane Roberts, Robert Butts, and Seth] called Elmira, New York, home for years, and appear to still be psychologically involved with the sites.)