Jane Roberts and My Healing Meditation Surprise

From late 1978 to early 1981, I published Coordinate Point, a magazine. It explored the possibility that we’re more than we think and that we create our reality from ideas we accept as belief. Its purpose was to provide people with a means to share their personal thoughts and experiences concerning the nature of consciousness and the role of beliefs in creating our reality. The magazine was inspired by two things: my lifelong search for better answers to questions like who are we, what’s reality, and what’s the purpose of life. The second thing was Seth (The Seth Books) and the material he channeled through Jane Roberts, recorded by her husband, Robert F. Butts Jr.

Seth, a nonphysical personality, shared his ideas about the nature of reality through Jane while her husband, Rob (Robert F. Butts Jr.), recorded and annotated each session. Jane also wrote many books on her own, including a book of poetry, before she died on September 5, 1984. Through the shared effort of Jane, Rob, and Seth, 25 books were written to explain how we create our reality.

Understandably, Jane Roberts was an important person to me, and still is. Not only did she respond to articles in Coordinate Point, she and Rob exchanged holiday cards and letters with my wife, Sandra, and I. Many were hand painted. After Jane died, her letters, holiday cards and copies of Coordinate Point were sent to Yale University, the official archive of the Seth material.

When a close friend of Jane’s, Sue Watkins, told me she wanted to write a book in Jane’s memory, I wanted to help. She said she was contacting known readers of the Seth material to see if they had experienced any unusual dream or psychic activity involving Jane before or since her death. If she found enough material, she would write a book (never written due to a shortage of material).

Below is a greatly shortened version of the story I shared with Susan in response to her request. It describes several unique experiences I had that involved Jane before and after she died Sept. 5, 1984 in Elmira, NY. Posted with approval from Robert F. Butts Jr., Jane’s husband.

*****

By Roger Peterson (Pete)

Before Jane’s Death

When Jane’s illness became serious enough to hospitalize her, I occasionally sent her healing energy during meditation. During these sessions, I would imagine her lying in bed at the Catholic hospital in Elmira, New York. At first, it was imaginary. I would sit here in California and go through the motions of sending Jane healing energy but it felt like an empty gesture.

One day, everything changed! Jane’s condition worsened and the thought of her dying filled my mind with grave concern. As this feeling grew, it transformed into a powerful source of energy. Excited, I thought why don’t I actually visit Jane in New York, even if it is in my astral form? The energy surrounding me felt so powerful, I wanted to put it to good use.

From my bedroom chair here in Santa Rosa, I felt my consciousness or essence leave my body and head to Elmira, NY. Even though I have never been there before, my soul knew where to go. Sure enough, I soon found myself floating horizontally in the air next to Jane’s hospital bed. She was dozing so I moved right up to her bedside. Placing my left hand inside her mattress and my right hand above her body, I tried moving them up and down her body to provide her with healing energy. Instead, my astral body moved back and forth.

Planting my feet on the floor for leverage and decreasing the density of my left hand so it could move more freely through the mattress, I began to move my hands up and down her body to bathe it in healing energy. Before long, I could feel energy and life returning to Jane’s cells and organs. They were waking up, coming back to life!

Suddenly, I was back in my bedroom again and staring at Jane’s angry face in front of me. Her face appeared out of thin air in front of me, surrounded by what appeared to be a nice oval wooden picture frame. As soon as our eyes locked, she yelled, “Stop it!” Seeing the shock on my face, her anger softened  and became a look of curiosity and concern. While I struggled to understand her reaction, she disappeared. After this dramatic encounter, I stopped sending her healing energy entirely, and a short while later, she died.

For several days after Jane’s dramatic appearance and disappearance in my bedroom, I was still in shock. All I could think about was her anger. Why did she yell at me when all I was trying to do was help her? Addressing her image immediately after she disappeared, I asked, What’s wrong with me, Jane, don’t you like me? Don’t you want my healing energy? As I compulsively looked for reasons why Jane didn’t want me to send her healing energy, my despair grew; and so did my awareness of how seriously and personally I take matters, how quickly I accept blame when things go wrong. The way other people act is always my fault. Why do I accept that idea? Did my experience in catholic school have something to do with it?*

* For more on this, read What I Learned in Catholic School.

Attempting to regain my emotional footing, I began to wonder if the problem might lie with Jane. Could it be she was so startled by my presence, she simply overreacted? Waking up to a ghost intimately moving its hands up and down the entire length of your body, and making it tingle, would startle me! Did she dislike my energy? Was I being too aggressive or intimate? My hands weren’t directly touching her but as I moved them up and down her body, I could feel  her breasts and buttocks as well as her internal organs through the sensitivity of my hands.

It wasn’t until much later that I took a second, more objective look, at Jane’s angry reaction in response to my astral visit to her bedside in New York. Susan Watkins, a member of Jane’s ESP class, contacted me about a new book proposal she was putting together concerning Jane. She was looking for material from readers who had impressions or experiences concerning her  before and after death.

By this time the painful memory of Jane’s reaction to me had subsided and I was able to think more objectively about the matter. Could it be that Jane didn’t really want to go on living, despite the many protests she made to the contrary to Rob and Seth? Deep down did she feel she had done enough in one lifetime? I ask this because Seth indicated that he had much more to share.

With this new line of questioning, Jane’s reaction began to make more sense. If she really wanted to get better, why didn’t she accept my healing energy if it was making her body feel better? Wouldn’t you if you were sick? Would you even know where this energy was coming from in the first place or who was sending it? I wouldn’t ask myself these questions unless I didn’t want to be healed. How would you react in this situation?

Jane admitted she would do whatever it takes to get Seth’s ideas out to the public. When her health declined beyond a certain point, when the pain and inconvenience of living exceeded the pleasure, did she decide it was time to leave? Another factor that may have played a role in Jane deciding to leave when she did was the fact that the Seth material was so profound and popular, Jane’s readers might not let her “finish” her work. Would she let herself finish it? As mentioned above, Seth had more to say.

After much thought, I concluded my motive in sending Jane healing energy was good. However, after being reminded by an article I read on death and dying, I realized I had never asked Jane if she wanted to be healed. I simply assumed she did because whenever Rob challenged her stated desire to get better and go home she always agreed that was what she wanted. Seth also kept trying to help her with healing suggestions. My approach was, undoubtedly, direct and aggressive, something Jane couldn’t ignore if what she really wanted was to die. Until I read that article, it hadn’t occurred to me that people might want to die at some point in their lives and why shouldn’t they be allowed to. It’s their life and body.

It makes perfect sense after thinking about it! I remember being sick with the flu one time and, for about an hour, I felt so bad I wanted to die. So, there are times and situations where death is preferable to life. That’s a good thing to remember. From now on I’ll ask people for permission before I attempt to help or heal them. Who knows better than us what we really want?

After Jane’s Death

After Jane died, I experienced several more visionary encounters with her. These were light and playful, and included sexual behavior. In my early post-death visions, a beautiful and nude young Jane would sit on my lap and engage in sex with me. While our encounters were playful and loving on the surface, I knew they held a much deeper significance. As we made love, I felt a bonding take place between us. It was deeper than the bond we normally create when we give each other mutual pleasure; it was the bond of commitment when individuals share a common goal that’s larger than life. Our common goal was and is our personal and collective evolution. Like Jane and Rob, my passion is finding the truth behind the nature of Being and Creation for the purpose of further developing our human and spiritual potential.

The last two times Jane appeared in my bedroom, she wore an attractive cotton summer dress with frills and simply hung in the air before me, her arms crossed, while I sat writing, or trying to write. Many times I just sat there staring at a blank sheet of paper. I knew she was there to support and encourage me. I also felt quite sure, that if I could have seen her right foot at these times, it would have been tapping impatiently on the floor in response to my often reluctant and irregular pace. It is 2004 now as I revisit and revise these pages, and the world seems to be more in need of help than ever. Personally, I’ve never felt more optimistic, because many people alive today want to change themselves and the world for the better.

*****

Looking for Clues to Jane’s Reaction

After writing about my experiences with Jane before and after her death, I decided to do some research to see if there were any clues in her and Rob’s writing that would explain why she reacted to my healing effort the way she did. Below are excerpts from Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Volume I and The God of Jane, a Psychic Manifesto. Dreams.., is a Seth Book by Jane, with introductory essays by Rob, Jane’s husband. Copyrighted by Jane Roberts in 1986, it was published the same year by Prentice Hall Press, A Division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Jane finished writing The God of Jane in 1981. The following excerpts are reprinted here with the kind permission of Robert F. Butts. They tell the story of Jane’s life and her clear intent to leave this reality when she did.

Excerpts from ESSAY 1 {Pages 16-17, Prentice Hall Press, Hardcover Edition}

Thursday, April 1, 1982

“Let my soul find shelter elsewhere”.

That evocative, prophetic line is from a Sumari song that Jane sang to herself a few days before she went into an Elmira, New York, hospital on February 26, 1982. Sumari is a “language” she can speak or sing while in trance, and which she can translate into English if and when she wants to. She recorded her brief song in a sad, low-pitched, quavering voice that was like none I’d heard her use before. Its indescribable depth of feeling was remarkably prescient in light of the events in our lives that preceded–and then followed–the hospital experience that affected us so much.

Indeed, I didn’t learn that Jane had made the tape until five weeks later, after she’d returned to our hill house from the hospital: I found it on March 30 (1982), amid others in her writing room. She hadn’t labeled it, and I began to play it out of curiosity. The song’s mournful tones swam heavily in the room. It reminded me at once of a dirge or an elegy, and I felt chills as I began to intuitively understand just how meaningful it was, even without any translation at all.

“Let my soul find shelter elsewhere,” Jane said, by way of a quick translation when I played the tape for her a few minutes later. It was mid-afternoon on a cold day. She sat bundled up in her chair in the living room, her head down as she listened. I asked her for more on the song’s interpretation, but she just repeated that line. She roused herself enough to stubbornly maintain that she’d give me more later. I knew at once that the tape’s contents were so revealing of her feelings about her illness, so disturbing and frightening, that she couldn’t bring herself to explore those deep emotions at that time. I also knew that my wife feared the effect of the message upon me–for what could the phrase she’d already given me mean, except that her soul had at least considered the possibility of leaving her physical body, perhaps to find shelter in a nonphysical realm? I accepted her reactions, and could only wait in some frustration as I began work on other parts of this essay.

– Robert F. Butts

According to Rob, {P.18} Jane entered the hospital on February 26, 1982, to spend …31 days there, being treated for a severely under-active thyroid gland (hypothyroidism), protruding eyes and double vision, an almost total hearing loss, a slight anemia, and budding bedsores, or decubitus ulcers.

At this time, Jane was also diagnosed as having “rheumatoid Arthritis” {P.19}.

After a brief introduction by Rob, Jane, herself, describes her state of mind shortly after returning home from the hospital:

{P. 20-24} After some hesitation following my question about having a (Jane channeling Seth) session this evening, Jane decided she wanted to contribute introductory material for Dreams. This was to be a new experience for us: Because of the arthritis she was having trouble even holding a pen, so she intended to dictate her material as though she were writing it herself in longhand. I was to take it down for her. This wasn’t to be Seth speaking.

(7:10 P.M. Thursday, April 1, 1982. Once she began dictation, Jane’s pace was good. In fact, I had to write very rapidly, for I didn’t want to ask her to slow down during this initial experiment.)

Seth uses the term “value fulfillment” as in the title of this book, to imply life’s greater values and characteristics–that is, we are alive not only to continue to ensure life’s existence, but to add to the very quality of life itself. We do not just receive the torch of life and pass it on as one Olympic runner does to another, but we each add to that living torch or flame a power, a meaning, a quality that is uniquely our own. We do this as individuals, as members of the family, the community, and members of the species. Whenever that flame shows signs of dimming, of losing rather than gaining potential energy and desire, then danger signals appear everywhere. They show up as wars and social disorders on national scales, and as household crises, as illnesses (pause), as calamities on personal levels as well.

In Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment Seth outlines the great cosmic and private energies that in our terms once brought into existence the reality of the universe and the birth of those private, cohesive realities in which our own individual daily lives are couched.

(7:20) It is impossible in our time scheme to intellectually know our own potentials without trying them out, without testing them against the world’s edges. We must activate our impulses and desires, try out our abilities, seek out our strengths by joyfully advancing into the given world of physical energy, physical time and space. In the development of each individual we act and reenact the startling events that brought our own universe into existence. The universe was not created in some dim past, but is newly recreated by our own thoughts, dreams, and desires–so that reality happens at all possible levels at once. And in that living endeavor we each play our part.

When we hesitate, hold back, falter, when we hold back energy in the hopes of saving it, when we allow fear rather than trust to guide our activities, when the quality of our lives becomes less than we know it should be–then warnings flash. (Long pause.) One crisis after another may arise to gain our attention. This has happened in many people’s lives–and so recently the same kind of warning appeared in my own life.

As I write this introduction, I am recovering from a group of illnesses, recuperating from a month’s stay in the hospital, and now I’m trying to see where my personal situation fits into Seth’s larger views. That is, the individual is not just a side issue in what people usually call the evolutionary process–but he or she is the entire issue, without which there would be no species, no survival, no exquisite web of genetic cooperation to produce living creatures of any kind whatsoever.

“Well, I need a cigarette,” Jane abruptly said at 7:36.

“You did terrifically, hon,” I exclaimed, patting her on a knee. “Terrific.”

“Yeah, I knew I got it–thank God,” she replied. Then we sat quietly side by side at the round card table we’d placed at one end of our battered old couch in the living room. In a far corner a sitcom rerun played on the large-screen television set. I’d turned off the sound before the session began. The whole room was bathed in a friendly, subdued yellow light. A rather strong northerly wind periodically rattled the house’s metal blinds. The whole creative intimacy of our hill house was one that we’d enjoyed many times; we desperately wanted to return to that same ambiance many more times.

“Well, I don’t know–maybe that’s all I can do tonight,” Jane finally said, with a bit of an embarrassed grin. “It’s hard for me to get into the next part….” But then at 7:45:)

In our other books I’d mentioned my physical symptoms now and then. By the time Seth finished dictating Dreams last month (On February 8), however, my physical condition had deteriorated. Two weeks later I could hardly get out of my chair (and) onto the couch or the bed. After answering approximately 50 letters one weekend, the next weekend I could barely hold a pen to write my name. Soon afterward my hearing began to fade, then suddenly became blocked. A few days later I wound up in the emergency room of one of our local hospitals–and there, all too quickly I became familiar with the medical profession’s battery of testing paraphernalia. (Long pause.) I was placed in a CAT scanner, my bare backside pressed painfully against a cold metal table, my head encircled by the strange doughnut, or globe, while bright white lights and numbers, it seemed, flashed everywhere. They only X-rayed my head.

(Jane meant, of course, a CT or computerized tomography scanner, a modern X-ray machine that shows the interior of the body in a series of brilliant cross-sectional images.)

(With a laugh at 7:51:) Later that same bare backside, thin and bony, was pressed against another metal table, while this time electrodes were attached to every available area of my head so that an electroencephalogram could be taken. No instructions were given to me except to close my eyes as the test progressed. (Pause.) Some kind of white gum, or glue, had been rubbed into my scalp through my hair to improve the electrical contacts, and when the test was finished the attendant simply grabbed one area of the equipment and pulled the entire mess off my head in one motion–which felt like my entire scalp was coming off. The obvious unconcern on the part of that middle-aged female attendant made me furious.

“Value Fulfillment?” I thought. “What the hell am I letting myself in for? And how have the events of my life come to such a turn?” This was, of course, as anyone familiar with hospitals knows, only the beginning. There were numberless blood tests. I also had to be lifted onto and off the bed, onto and off the portable commode.

(Pause at 8:05.) My 82 pounds of flesh were hauled, dragged, pulled, and stretched by good natured but often impatient strangers–nurses and orderlies and aides–and the most private of my physical processes became a matter of public record. What a shocker!

“See, I never know how much to put in these intros,” Jane said. “So many different kinds of people read the books–“

“Just do it your own way,” I said. “The hell with it. There’s nothing else you can do.”

I remember when I had my first bowel movement at the hospital. Eyes closed to hold back tears of humiliation, I felt my arms lifted by an orderly (long pause), my thin belly and ribs straining in the brightly lit room, my backside lifted and supported by two other strange arms, while a third person–I don’t want to sound too vulgar–

(8:12. “Forget it,” I said. “We’ll fix it if necessary.”)

–wiped away the results of the three strong doses of prune juice I’d been given. Yet there was, I knew, a fellowship even in those processes–one that I had perhaps too long ignored: the quality of fellowship, as a species or a family or a community comes together to help one of its own kind. And as I was to see, even for all of the pessimistic suggestions of medical science itself, in the very middle of crisis there was a certain indisputable sense of cooperation–a “vulgar” physical optimism, and a kind of humor that I had long forgotten existed.

(8:21.) In this book, Seth does discuss to some degree the nature of certain illnesses as they apply to individual life and genetic survival. And there I lay in the hospital for a full month, with physical survival uppermost in my mind–hardly a coincidence. They told me that my thyroid gland was very underactive, and that I had arthritis. They X-rayed my hands but not my knees. One of the blood tests showed that I was slightly anemic. But other tests and X-rays revealed that I had sound lungs–in spite of my smoking–a good heart and stomach and other organs. I laughed.

(Long pause at 8:22. I thought Jane was tiring. She might have added that she also laughed because neither did she have a brain tumor, cancer, vasculitis [an inflammation of the blood vessels], or any of several other diseases the doctors thought might be present. She felt she’d beaten a number of negative suggestions from medical personnel in connection with all of those afflictions.)

I liked practically all of the doctors and nurses and orderlies, and they liked me. Most of them didn’t know or care “who I was.” Very few were familiar with my work (although a few local fans–strangers–eventually found their way to my hospital room). I found I could hold my own in that environment that at first had seemed so alien. I learned to joke even as my backside swung perilously above the commode, while I hoped that its aim was true in the hands of the nurses and orderlies–and again I felt that long-forgotten camaraderie with people, and a growth within myself apart from my work, or what I did. I had a right to be on earth because I’d been born here like every other physical creature, and on that level alone I was part of a great framework of physical energy and cooperation.

(8:31 P.M.) “Well, that’s all for now,” Jane said after a long pause. “I sure am surprised I did that much. I didn’t know I could do it–especially that way…I’d never have tried it if you hadn’t suggested it.”

Jane hadn’t dictated this material while in a trance or a dissociated state, as she does when producing her Seth material. She hadn’t felt particularly inspired, nor at all sure how to proceed. It was just that she’s always used longhand or a typewriter for her own work, she said, and never dictated it, as many writers do these days. Just the same, her creative abilities had immediately come to her aid.

Jane continues in:

ESSAY 2

Monday, April 5, 1982

{P. 25-26} (7:15 P.M. Our next “Jane session” took place four days later, on the date shown above. Once again we sat at the card table in the living room. And once again Jane wavered at times between waking and dozing. When she did begin dictation, though, her pace was good.)

In later years it’s become impossible for me to close my eyes to the multiple pressing differences that exist between Seth’s explanation of the nature of reality, and of our own private experience of it. In this book, Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value fulfillment, for example, Seth portrays us as a vibrant, well-intended species–a physically attuned kind of consciousness beautifully tailored by our own cosmic ingredients to live lives of productivity, of spiritual and physical enjoyments, with each individual life in charge of its own fate and adding to the potentials of all other life as well.

Yet, I read all of those dire newspaper stories predicting disaster, and (oh yes, dear readers) I watched the daily tragic news events dramatized in living color on our television screen. But more than that, I’ve seen in my own life the steady accumulation of physical symptoms.

If life has such great potentials, as Seth maintains, if it began–and begins (and continues to begin) at such rich creative and productive levels–then why did our experience so often make it seem that we struggled against unknowing or uncaring cosmic forces, or that we were at the most so ignorant of our own source and creativity that our hands were tied, or that we were forever shut off from our natural heritage?

There was no doubt that we’d been reading ourselves “wrong.” There was no doubt as far as I was concerned that every one of our standard explanations for life (pause) were relatively useless now, regardless of how much they might have helped or hindered us in the past.

(Long pause at 7:51.) It began to strike me that even my own physical incapacities were indeed creative ventures that appeared in my experience as bad, or limiting, or even tragic. Perhaps they were instead efforts on the part of my own explorations of value fulfillment to reorganize my life’s vast energies. But instead of facing up to a considerable change in life-style, I panicked and felt myself to be almost assaulted, forced into a life that offered less and less physical freedom. So again, how did that experience fit into Seth’s Dreams, Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment?

As far as I can see, I’ve been living with two sets of “facts”, for some years. The old established explanations had faltered, and finally seemed almost incomprehensible, while the new explanations of Seth seemed beyond my reach, at least in certain areas–areas that were vital to physical and psychic peace. The same processes appeared in my husband Rob’s life, of course, as our lives seemed to impinge into the area of man’s greatest hopes, and into the opposite area of his greatest fears.

Excerpts from ESSAY 3

Friday, April 16, 1982

According to Rob, the next two paragraphs (plus two others I’ve omitted) were hand written by Jane “painfully” while “holding her pen awkwardly”.

{P. 32-34} (9:30 A.M. Friday, April 16, 1982.)

So, one thing I know: I’m a far different person now as I write this introduction than I was when Seth dictated the book. And as he spoke of the beginnings of the world, I began to play with the idea of quietly ending my own private sphere of existence. Not through a violent suicide, but through a half-calculated general retreat.

Few overt hints of this appear in Rob’s notes for Dreams. For one thing, the process of withdrawal was slow at the start. For another, when Seth was more than three quarters of the way through Dreams he began devoting a series of private sessions to an in-depth discussion of “the magical approach”–material that was calculated to help me personally, and others like me, change our approach to experience and thus experience itself. Rob’s detailed notes about my physical condition, then, appear in those pages.

(11:30. Finally I began writing down Jane’s words as I’d done before….)

Indeed, Seth’s material on the magical approach {Now a finished book, thanks to Rob, called The Magical Approach: Seth Speaks About the Art of Creative Living.} was so fascinating that by the time he finished Dreams I’d already put together large portions of it in a separate book, even if much of it was personal. Not only that, but those “magical” sessions had naturally developed into another series, this time on a portion of the personality Seth called “the sinful self”–mine as well as that of others–and those sessions had in turn led me to produce many pages of material directly from my own sinful self. That great personal revelation took place in June 1981. Ironically, then, in the midst of my own half-conscious withdrawal I’d been giving birth to not only Seth’s Dreams, but several other intriguing long-range concepts. And even if all of those sessions had been born out of my own psychic and psychological challenges and dilemmas, I knew they were excellent and deserved publication.

I could feel Rob hoping that my own efforts would help me. In a hundred ways he tried his best to help me on his own. Seth resumed work on Dreams during that July, but each day I seemed to work less and less. Summer turned into fall, then winter, and I hardly noticed. I began to doze in my chair as I sat at my desk. On occasion I was consciously aware of thinking how easy it might be on certain levels to let my desires drop one by one–there seemed to be few left in any case–and let myself drift off into an unastonished death.

That is, I thought it could happen so easily and naturally and painlessly that there would be no one point where you could say, “Now she lives and now she doesn’t.”

Maybe I produced all I was meant to. Maybe the fire of my life was coming to its own natural conclusion. Why try to fan it into life again, particularly if its initial joy had forever vanished? Maybe that course was better than the determination and painful discomforts that might be necessary to prolong lifely existence. So I was to some extent only half alarmed to hear from some strange inner existence my own voice slow down. Tremors appeared in it, as if the vowels and symbols had endless gaps–uneven edges–and some part of me was escaping like smoke even between my words.

(11:35. “Let me relax for a minute,” Jane said. Her pace had been fast. Then more slowly:)

My hearing began to fail, at first gradually. Let people talk around me, I thought: I no longer cared. Then with bewildering impact I found myself one day almost entirely deaf. Here was no gentle lulling silence, for the absence of sound frightened me beyond anything I could remember. (Long pause.) Was Rob in the room? If I couldn’t see him I couldn’t tell. Did he stand protectively just behind my chair, ready to help me in my maneuvers into bed, or was he in the kitchen, rooms away? There were no sounds of footsteps upon the carpeted floors, no telltale hint of activity. The experience interrupted my retreat. I remember somehow equating all the silence about me with a forbidding white wall. And in parentheses: (I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did.) I couldn’t die deaf (Jane said with a laugh at 11:45). I think I had imagined that everything would shut down gradually. I certainly hadn’t planned on one sense suddenly turning off.

The next few days, in mid-February 1982, found me determined to clear up the hearing problem–and on one level at least, it was that determination that led me finally to the hospital emergency room….

{P. 35-41} (This evening [on April 16] Jane suggested that we sit at our living room table while I read her morning’s dictation to her. But instead: “Well, I guess I’ll do a Seth thing tonight,” she announced, rather to my surprise, “but it won’t be long at all….” This is the second time she’s spoken for Seth since leaving the hospital. When she went into trance at 7:39 her Seth voice had a distinct tremor–one decidedly more pronounced than on April 12–and a hard-to-define faraway quality. She spoke with many long pauses. I think that in the following excerpts Seth rather neatly encapsulates her past beliefs, her present condition, and how far she has yet to go in meeting her challenges. [Not that I’m the innocent bystander in all of this, of course. I’m deeply involved.])

Now: the same process involving the thyroid gland has happened several times in his (Rubert’s) {Seth–who claims to be discarnate–calls Jane by her male “entity name,” Ruburt, and thus the use of “he” and “him.”} life, and in each of those cases it has repaired itself.

If earlier, however, Ruburt had the erroneous idea that he was going too fast–or would or could–and had to restrain himself and exert caution, now he received the medical prognosis, the “physical proof” that such was not the case, and in fact that the opposite was true: He was too slow. If our words could not convince him, or his own understanding grasp the truth, then you had the “truth” uttered with all of the conviction of the medical profession’s authority. And if once a doctor had told him years ago how excellent was his hearing, the medical profession now told him that his slowness (his thyroid deficiency) had helped impair his hearing to an alarming degree.

Moreover, here is the medication necessary–the thyroid supplement–that will right that balance. And so it will.

(Long pause at 7:46.) If Ruburt once found himself imagining that he must be strong and perfect enough to help solve everyone else’s problems, now he found himself relatively helpless and “undefended”–that is, his physical condition put him in [such a situation]. The super-perfect, (7:58.) impractical self-image simply fell away. It could not survive such a situation.

(7:50.) So contrary to its {his} own beliefs, and helpless or not, Ruburt was holding his own….

There was a certain comradeship existing between himself and others [in the hospital]. Desires and impulses became more immediate, clearer-cut, easier to identify. The discomforts of a physical nature led to instant responses…. His weaknesses were out in the open, dramatically presented, and from that point, unless he chose death he could only go forward–for suddenly he felt that there was after all some room to move, that achievements were possible, where before all accomplishments seemed beside the point in the face of his expected superhuman activity.

He will, then, continue to improve, because he has allowed himself some room for motion, for change of value fulfillment. Trust the body’s rhythms as these changes occur, however. Going out in the yard (as Jane did this afternoon in a wheel chair, accompanied by her nurse) was an excellent case in point, important on practical and symbolic levels.

(Long pause at 8:01.) In a manner of speaking, the sinful self created the superhuman self-image that demanded so much, and it encased Rubert’s body as if in concrete. Well, that image cracked and crumbled in the hospital experience, leaving Ruburt with his more native, far more realistic image of himself. It is one he can work with. Do, when you can, look over my “magical approach” material. Ruburt kept turning down his thermostat, so to speak. Now his desires and intents have set it upon a healthy, reasonable setting, and the inner processes are automatically activated to bring about the normal quickening of his body, as before his intent led to the body’s automatic slowness.

Enough for this evening. I bid you a fond good evening–and know that you have taken, both of you, important new strides.

(Good night, Seth, I said.)

(8:10 P.M. Jane’s Seth voice had grown a little stronger as she progressed with the session. We were very encouraged by two key points Seth had mentioned: that her thyroid gland had repaired itself before–such an event happening now would free her of dependence upon medication–and that her sinful self’s superhuman image had “cracked and crumbled in the hospital experience.” Those two developments could leave her body free to heal itself….

“I wonder what you’ll be doing six months from now, if Seth’s right?” I asked. “The body finally became so desperate to free itself from that rigid sinful-self superhuman image that it took itself into the hospital for a month–even if it did almost kill itself in order to get there….”; Jane concurred. And right away she described several occasions when she thought her thyroid gland had rather seriously misbehaved. I remember two of them.)

After the session I began to wonder what Jane’s “sinful self” would have to say now, in comparison to the material she’d received from it in June 1981. During that fervent bout of activity her sinful self had explained and defended its actions most eloquently throughout some 36 closely handwritten pages. Both of us had been appalled at the revelations coming through Jane’s pen, even if we did grudgingly admit that we understood, intellectually at least, many of the points that self made. I’d grown very angry as the material unfolded–angry at that portion of Jane’s psyche for clinging so tenaciously to such a set of beliefs, for whatever reasons, and angry at myself for not understanding any better than she did their extent and depth, and just how damaging they could be in ordinary terms. I’d also been reminded of material Seth himself had given a few weeks earlier, in a very important private session on April 16: “Many of Rubert’s beliefs have changed, but the core belief in the sinful self has been very stubborn. (To me:) While you do not possess it in the same fashion, you are also tainted by it, picking up such beliefs from early background, and primarily from your father in that regard….”

…Certainly Jane chose all of her challenges in this life, just as I did, and as we believe each person does, but a major concomitant of focusing upon certain activities involves how one copes with them (often in close cooperation with others) as the years pass. What new and original depths of feeling and idea are uncovered, layer by layer, what new insights, what rebellions, and, yes, what acceptances….

I could write many windy pages about the mysteries of life, I suppose, and how each of us does the best we can, although often we may not understand what we’re doing; but what I really want to do is simply note that in her case, fortunately, and even if she thinks she’s failed in certain major areas of life, Jane has achieved some remarkable insights into her own situation (as I have into mine, being her marriage partner). She’s managed to do this with the help of various portions of her own personality, the Seth material, and me. Our hope is that her case can help illuminate others. There are reasons–creative reasons–why she can’t walk now, or write in longhand. We insist upon knowing what those reasons are. Some of them were obviously engendered by and within Jane’s so-called sinful self. What challenges she and I have to meet! Once again, let me quote Seth from that private session Jane held just a year ago, on April 16, 1981: “Your kind of consciousness, relatively speaking, involves some intrinsic difficulties along with spectacular potentials. You are learning how to form reality from your own beliefs, while having at the same time the freedom to choose those beliefs–to choose your mental state in a way that the animals, for example, do not. In that larger picture (underlined) there are no errors, for each action, pleasant or not, will in its fashion be redeemed, both in relationship to itself and…to a larger picture that the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive.

Fine. We agree with Seth’s overall view, and that a sublime mystery is implied–but we also want to achieve as much as we can of that redemption now, and on conscious physical and psychological levels.

At the end of May and early in June 1981 we published two books involving years of effort: Seth-Jane’s The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, and Jane’s The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto. I was positive that those volumes contained much excellent work. I was also positive that with their publication Jane’s symptoms–especially her walking difficulties–became considerably worse. On the surface at least, it was as though some powerful portion of her psyche (was) exacting a grim compensation for the books’ appearance in the marketplace. Perhaps, I thought, that portion was creating a physical disability that allowed Jane to publish forbidden material while protectively isolating herself–and me–from rejection by the physical world. Both of us became terribly upset. Our joint lifework teetered upon the edge of a physical disaster.

It could hardly have been accidental, then, that beginning on June 17, 1981, our deep need led to Jane’s spontaneous production of her own sinful-self material. The way had been illuminated by Seth himself in his private sessions, with his discussions of her sinful self and related challenges: Those sessions, the publication of the two books, Jane’s personal sinful-self material and her worsening physical situation, all combined to serve as a complex trigger. Here are those promised, very revealing passages. Again, my few insertions are bracketed.

STATEMENT OF THE SINFUL SELF

I resent the designation unjustly given to me, for if I have believed in the phenomenon of sin and sought–apparently too rigidly–to avoid it, my intentions and interests always were not the avoidance of sin so much as the pursuit of eternal truths; the alliance with universal goals, the unity in spirit at least of self, whole self, and universal mind. Those goals ignite your creative powers and have (and still do) propelled you to explore all categories of existence possible, seeking to express those divine mysteries that lie within and behind each existence–yours, and mine as well.

Our explorations involved no secondhand evidence handed down by others, but the direct personal encounter of our consciousness and being with the vast elements of the unknown–a meeting of the self (human and vulnerable) with the psychological realms of gods and eternities; giant realms of mind that our nature felt attracted to…and [was] uniquely equipped to perceive.

I believed in the soul’s survival first of all, and inspired the “creative self” to step out as freely as possible even while in my heart I [also] believed in the existence of sin and devil. I felt upon my heart the heavy unkind mark of Cain, sensing that humanity carries (unfairly) the almost indelible strain–the tragic flaw–[of] being tinged by sin and ancient iniquities. Thusly I reasoned: If I am flawed I must automatically distort even those experiences of the soul that seem clearest. I must unwittingly fall into error when I trust myself the most, since I share that sinful propensity. Yet despite these feelings did I (did we) unswervingly set forward.

The belief in sin and in the sinful self has been for uncounted centuries embedded in man’s concepts about himself and God. Around those beliefs civilizations evolved and religions orbited. So I maintain that I am being unfairly attacked (perhaps that is too strong a word) for personally accepting in my own understanding a philosophy to which ten millions and more have also succumbed, and to which the “wisest” of the species have given their loyalty and trust.

Yet even in our [Jane’s] childhood years I yearned to free us from such doctrines, to search for alternate explanations, to go where no man or woman had gone before, and to venture outside the boundaries of all official beliefs.

And to me this was no play but the main challenge–to discover while within one life all life’s meaning; to acquire in one life’s vulnerable swiftness evidence of eternity’s breadth and depth, to sniff out its extended unknown dimensions. So if in the pursuit of such goals I overdid my cautions and overreacted, it certainly was not out of malice, but in a well-meaning attempt to protect the creative self–to keep a hand of caution on its course lest the centuries of man’s belief in sin carried a true weight that I shared but could not comprehend.

Easy enough to discard this or that symbol of evil, but suppose all such symbols hid some deep truth, and cast some restraining base of force that in my ignorance I still did not perceive? For by this time in our experience, yours and mine, the creative self was rambunctiously rushing forward, despite all the cautionary statements of many ancient and modern documents, and our books were being read by millions.

So the belief in man’s sinful nature persisted in my mind, a constant reminder of man’s ignorance of his own nature. How could I be sure that our sight wasn’t also distorted; that our sin” was in not accepting sin as a value? Perhaps sin itself contained some value that escaped beyond our calculations, still undiscovered.

So in a fashion [Jane’s] physical symptoms became a psychological disclaimer, so that in some court of larger values we could not be “sued” for leading others astray from entrenched beliefs that we were still discarding, while not having any completed structure that would allow easy access or safe passage from one “life raft” to the new one that we were trying to provide….

But–it now becomes evident–I was myself tinged not by sin in a metaphysical sense (as I thought I might me), but with a belief in sin (itself) that I had not dismissed. Therefore the disclaimer was necessary to protect myself and others from any fatal flaw in our work–a flaw that sin’s blindness made invisible….

And so on. It all was–and is–great material, and more accurate and penetrating than my own ideas as to why some portion of Jane’s psyche might feel a need for protection from the world, or from another part of herself.

*****

Excerpts from ESSAY 4

Saturday, April 17, 1982

{P. 43-45} (7:30 P.M. …Jane said she’d like to do some more dictation of her 0wn…)

(Long pause at 7:34.) …if spontaneous order was such a vital ingredient in the workings of the universe, then what was I doing trying to shut it down in my own life?

(Long pause at 7:40.) In the meantime, Rob and I often thought that this very book would never be completed. I might decide that I’d given enough years and energy to the Seth pursuit. Without making any conscious decision, I might simply cease having sessions. (Long pause.) I did continue with the sessions, of course. The book is finished. I realize more and more that life’s experience is played out in a framework that stretches between life’s contrasts. We live in a world slung between our dearest hopes and greatest fears, while seldom encountering either in their pure form.

(7:48. Jane spoke with much emphasis here. As if on cue, through an open front window a quickening breeze stirred the long glass wind chimes hanging just inside; their pealing harmony filled the living room. The chimes had been sent to us by fans we’ve never met.)

Value fulfillment is the largest issue here, both with Seth’s book and my own experience, and if I really understood what Seth was saying in this book, I would not have needed to undergo such an uncomfortable drama in my daily life.

(Long pause at 7:51.) Our vitality wants to express itself. The whole world of nature is an irrepressible, expressible area of expansion. Old ideas of the survival of the fittest, conventional evolutionary processes, gods and goddesses, cannot hope to explain the “mystery of the universe”–but when we use our own abilities gladly and freely, we come so close to being what we are that sometimes we come close to being what the universe is. Then even our most unfortunate escapades, our most sorrowful ventures are not deadended, but serve as doorways into a deeper comprehension and a more meaningful relationship with the universe of which we are such a vital part.

(7:58. “End of introduction,” Jane abruptly said.)

Excerpts from ESSAY 8

Sunday, May 23, 1982

{P. 75} In our ceaseless search for answers to an unending list of personal questions, we discussed the notion that in her own way Jane has described a circle from her childhood: Her parents, Marie and Delmer, were married in Saratoga Springs, a well-known resort town in upper New York State, in 1928. They were divorced in 1931, when Jane was two years old. (Jane didn’t see her father again–he came from a broken home himself–until she was 21.) By the time Jane was three years old, her mother was having serious problems with rheumatoid arthritis. Indeed, the daughter has only one conscious memory of seeing her mother on her feet. All we have are a few photographs Del took of Marie not long after their marriage. They show a beautiful woman wearing a bathing suit, standing on a beach in Florida.

Some of our other books contain more information on how Jane grew up fatherless, and with a Marie who soon became bedridden and embittered. Mother and child were supported by welfare, and assisted over the years by a series of itinerant housekeepers–a number of these were prostitutes who, according to Jane, were periodically thrown out of “work” when town officials would shut down the “houses,” try to clean up gambling, and so forth. Marie was a brilliant, angry woman who lived in near-constant pain, and who regularly abused her daughter through behavior that, if not psychotic, was certainly close to it. (She would terrify the young Jane by stuffing cotton in her mouth and pretending she’d committed suicide, for example.) Jane also spent time in a strictly run Catholic orphanage. Her father died in 1971, when he was 68. Her mother died in 1972, at the same age; Jane, who hadn’t seen Marie for a number of years, did not attend the funeral. I didn’t urge her to do so either. For my part, I’d always felt uneasy in Marie’s presence on the few occasions we Met.

From The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto, Jane states in her own words that:

{P. 40-42.} My parents were divorced by the time I was three years old, but most of my childhood friends came from broken homes too, so that didn’t particularly bother me. My mother was a bed-ridden arthritic invalid; I’d never seen her walk; and that I did consider a special circumstance. We were on welfare–hardly an unusual situation–but I was the only kid I knew who was being supported by taxpayers’ money, and this was a special circumstance in my mother’s mind and in mine; one we railed against constantly.

I wrote poetry as far back as I can remember, at home, in school, anywhere, everywhere, and at any time. To me this represented another special circumstance; one that seemed to give me some kind of uneasy status, as if I possessed a definite recognizable ability that no one new quite what to do with–a remarkable but relatively worthless talent to someone in my particular position.

Again, those situations are hardly outstanding in life’s larger context, but in my home town they seemed to set me apart. I also spent nearly two years in an institution called St. Vincent’s Female Orphanage while my mother was in a hospital, and on my return home I didn’t particularly feel like “one of the gang.”

Other events that most people didn’t know about set me apart in my own mind too. One day my mother would say that she loved me, and the next day she’d scream that she was sorry I’d ever been born–that I’d ruined her life. She blamed me for the death of her mother who went out one evening to buy me shredded wheat for supper and was killed in an automobile accident. I was six. She also blamed me for the death of our favorite housekeeper, who died of a stroke in my arms when I was thirteen, right after the three of us had an argument. My mother would often stuff her mouth with cotton and hold her breath, pretending that she was dead, to scare me when I was small. In later years when I was in grade school and high school, she’d threaten suicide, sometimes saying that she’d also mail a letter to the police stating that I’d murdered her. And she did attempt suicide four or five times.

She was on all kinds of medically prescribed drugs, which helps explain some of her actions; and if she could be “a terror,” she was also quite intelligent, imaginative, and above all, dramatic. She finally ran a telephone service from her bed, with my help. When I was in grade school she took creative writing courses by proxy, sending me to nighttime adult writing courses where I took notes for her and she did the assignments.

I mention all this now simply to make the point that my early life, like most of my readers’, had its share of family misunderstandings and its own challenges.

It also had its own unique advantages. Our neighborhood bristled with vitality, and I used to sit on the porch steps and observe it all, and write my poetry when my chores were done. And listen. I felt even then that I had some direct connection with the universe. When I wrote poetry, the universe seemed to talk to me. Sometimes I talked back, and on rare occasions we spoke at once. There were even some cultural advantages that I quite took as my right at the time. These came along with rich doses of dogma from the priests, sent by our local Catholic church to be my “spiritual” fathers, and to compensate for my not having a male parent right at hand.

As I grew older the priests became younger, leading to some situations that in retrospect seemed rather hilarious if unfortunate enough; then, they really shattered my idealism in certain areas. But, no matter. On the other side of that slippery ledger, the priests were highly educated men for the times. They introduced me to “good music,” books, and philosophy. One old Irish priest read to us from a book of English poetry every Sunday afternoon for years. By the time I was in my middle teens though, the church and my poetry parted company when the priests objected to the ideas I was beginning to express. Where my poetry goes, I follow–so as I’ve written elsewhere, it was goodbye to the Catholic Church and as far as I was concerned to conventional Christianity as well.

Some of my ideas certainly came from my mother’s father. She and he had a family argument and didn’t see each other for twenty years, though we all lived in the same town. Mother wouldn’t let my grandfather in the house. She let me visit him though. He was part Indian and part French, a tiny, dark-haired man with an Indian hooked nose; tight-lipped and stubborn. But he talked to me about the spirits of the fire and the wind, and took me for long walks in a nearby woods, while he told me Indian legends.

After winning an “honorary mention” {P. 43.} in a national poetry contest, Jane was granted a scholarship to Skidmore college in Saratoga Springs, New York, “on the other side of town”.

{P. 43-44.} The scholarship didn’t begin to pay expenses, of course, so I worked a series of jobs all through college–writing for the local newspaper, for the college itself, and anywhere I could during the summers.

The entire world seemed to open up for me. My writing brought me to the attention of a then well-known writer, Caroline Slade, who published in the national women’s magazines and had a best-selling novel besides. Caroline introduced me at Yaddo, the famous writers’ colony, which also happened to be in Saratoga (or rather on its outskirts)….

In college, I did well in subjects I liked, poorly in those I disliked, was president of the Day Students’ Council, contributed to the school literary magazine, went wild reading a popular book on Einstein’s theories, and very nearly flunked biology twice–I couldn’t, wouldn’t dissect the frog. I’d already been fairly well grounded in American and English poetry, and now I fell headlong into the world of philosophy and became much more aware of fiction and the novel.

I never daydreamed about being a mother, or even about being married in conventional terms. Sometimes I saw myself living in Greenwich Village, in New York City, as a proud and poor poet. Sometimes I saw myself as a college English teacher, spending my nights writing poetry until dawn. And I still like to write nights….

P. 46.} As I thought about the past though, it was obvious that my experiences had stimulated me to ask questions I might not have asked otherwise–questions that were to lead me to seek a greater framework. And as I wrote this chapter, I began to see more clearly how I’d come to encourage impulses that led to writing and curtail those that led in any other direction. Still, I didn’t feel as impatient with myself as I had earlier. I even thought, with a grin, “You’ve come a long way, baby!”

Returning to Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, {P. 77.}, Rob continues:

In physical terms, then, I think it quite possible that in Jane’s case long-term stress, beginning in her early childhood, consistently overstimulated her immune system. Over and over Marie told Jane that she was no good, that the daughter’s birth had caused the mother’s illness. Well before she was 10 years old Jane had developed persistent symptoms of colitis, an inflammation of the large intestine/bowel that is often associated with emotional stress. By her early teens she had an overactive thyroid gland. Marie–and others–told her that she would burn herself out and die before she was 20 years old. Her vision was poor; she required very strong glasses (which she seldom wore). Finally in her mid-30s there came the beginning of rheumatoid arthritis: Jane’s immune system greatly increased its attack on her body….

Speculating upon the roles family members may have played in Jane’s life regarding her creativity and illness {P. 77-79.}, Rob goes on to say:

…There are as many possibilities–and probabilities–as one can think of. I can hardly begin to list them all here. In Framework 2 (Rob’s reference to Inner Consciousness or the larger reality of possible and probable events from which physical reality emerges each moment), for example, Marie, pregnant with Jane, could have decided with her daughter-to-be upon certain sequences of action to be pursued during their lives. Or in Framework 2 the two of them could have cooperated upon such a decision before Marie’s birth, even. If reincarnation is to be considered, their disturbed relationship this time might reflect past connections of a different yet analogous nature, and may also have important effects upon any future ones. Additionally, Jane could have chosen the present relationship to eventually help her temper reception of and reaction to the Seth material, making her extra-cautious; this, even though she’d seen to it ahead of time that she would be born with that certain combination of fortitude and innocence necessary for her to press on with her chosen abilities. She could have made a pact ahead of time to “borrow” certain mystical qualities from her maternal grandfather, who was part French Canadian and part Canadian Indian (specific tribe unknown by us), and with whom she strongly identified as a child. And Jane’s resolve, her will that, according to Seth, “is amazingly strong” (in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality, see the 713th session for October 21, 1974), may buttress the understanding and determination of one or more of her counterparts in this life; she may meet (or have met) such an individual; another may live across an ocean, say, with no meeting ever to take place in physical terms.

In all of this I’ve barely hinted at the complicated relationships involving other family members from the past, present, and future. The mathematical combinations possible are vast. And what’s my role in all of this, for heaven’s sake (to make a pun)? Or that of members of my own family? What part do I play, and have yet to play, in Jane’s redemption*–as well as my own–and on what level or levels? When did the two of us make our own pacts in Framework 2 (or other frameworks), and how will they work out in Framework 1 (Earth or material reality). But it’s even possible that all together Marie, Jane, her grandfather, and I set up the original situation before the physical births of any of us–and in some probable reality (if not this one) we did do just that! Words become terribly inadequate tools to express what I feel and am trying to write here, for I want to record at once every combination of relationships I can conceive of….

Whatever the initial course of action agreed to in just this probable reality by everyone involved, from whatever point in the “past,” in Framework 1 the participants have subjected it to an almost infinite variety of choices and modifications through the years: but always–always–within nature’s great structure, and accompanied by the utter freedom of each person concerned to accept, reject, abort, or change the whole affair from their individual perspective at any moment….

To return to just Jane and Marie, then, I think that their long-range cyclical behavior and interaction, no matter how painful it may seem on the surface, represented deep challenges set up by mother and daughter for certain overall purposes that they wanted to experience, separately and jointly. Not only would the two women be emotionally tested and enriched across physical and psychological time, but so would their entities or whole selves.

__________________________________

* Rob on redemption: {P.54-55.} …I still implicitly believe the quotation Seth gave on April 16, 1981, over a year ago now: “In that larger picture there are no errors, for each action, pleasant or not, will in its fashion be redeemed, both in relation to itself and …to a larger picture that the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive.”

I’m certainly not writing here about the idea of redemption in the ordinary religious sense, although I think it’s perfectly possible that in some other frameworks, larger than our taken-for-granted physical and psychological one, the idea of redemption–of understanding and embracing–may be involved in a “religious” sense, as part of an intuitive grasp of All That Is.

Since I’m so closely related to Jane in this life, through marriage, as well as through at least several reincarnational and counterpart roles (according to Seth and our own feelings), I’m as deeply involved in this search for redemption as she is. Given our present ideas about the limitless nature of consciousness, we think our joint quest has been underway since before our births–by choice–and we expect it to continue for the rest of our physical lives. I don’t mean that physical or psychic healings, for example, can’t or won’t take place “this time around,” but that if they do happen they too will be deeply connected with those overall, much broader patterns of our lives. To me, redemption means a continuous search or journey, then, involving whatever events and interchanges we choose to create, for whatever purposes along the way–and truly, I think, some of those purposes will involve things “the conscious mind may not be able presently to perceive.” That we believe such things speaks for our own brands of faith, then, and also signifies that Jane and I think we have much to learn. And we try to keep in our minds Seth’s statement that “your intellect does not have to know the answers to all of your questions.”

________________________________

{P. 90-92.} So, although I think that Jane has made some “remarkable gains” during recent weeks, I also think that basically she has yet to resolve the entire issue of her illnesses–or even whether to continue life. Seth put it beautifully a couple of months ago in the session for April 12–the first time Jane spoke for him since leaving the hospital–and I return to it again and again. See the essay for April 16: “The entire issue (of Jane’s living) had been going on for some time, and the argument–the argument being somewhat in the nature of a soul facing its own legislature, or perhaps standing as a jury before itself, setting its own case in a kind of private yet public psychic trial. Life decisions are often made in just such a fashion. With Ruburt they carried a psychic and physical logic and economy….”

Obviously, Jane’s deliberations over whether to continue physical life are much easier to appreciate when she’s depressed and/or physically uncomfortable, and during those times I can sense the fluctuations in her examination of her psyche. Portions of her are still quite deliberately thinking it all over, I’m sure, although she doesn’t mention this outside the session frameworks she provides for Seth and herself.

“I probably didn’t want to write any more,” she dictated in her own session for May 27. “I feared I’d lost all inspiration–that 20 years of answers weren’t enough, and that perhaps my life had no place to go if that were the case….”

At my age (63), then, I’m learning once again that I can’t live Jane’s life for her, or protect her from the motivations of her own physical and psychic explorations and choices, no matter how much I may want to. Nor could she do that for me. On many levels that kind of psychic interference is quite simply ignored by the individual in question, and rightly so. Jane’s determination would see to her own protection in any case. And her innate mystical nature must fully know and accept that the time, manner, and method of her physical death, whenever it occurs, is as much a part of her body’s life as its life is. I deeply believe that her psyche would insist that she doesn’t need any sort of basic protection by me (or anyone else) to begin with–only understanding. I live daily with the proposition that my wife is in the process of making profound decisions, and that once she’s made them she’ll respond accordingly both physically and mentally.

In that sense Jane’s whole self or entity accepts her actions completely, as part of the learning process available to “it” through her individuality–nor do I mean it does so in any passive or remote sense at all, but in the most intimate, sensitive terms possible, and also, probably, in ways we cannot appreciate now. At that moment of joining with her whole self, whenever her “death” does take place, all will be resolved with the finest creativity and understanding, for I believe that Jane herself will certainly continue “living” as an individual.

I also believe that these kinds of challenges–involving decisions about whether to continue physical life–have always existed for every creature on earth (just as they have for the earth itself as a living entity). Jane and I have no idea of how our personal story is going to work out, but we do want to tell it.

Apropos of the material I’ve been covering in these pages, I want to close this essay with quotations from two sessions that I’ve always thought were among the best Seth has given. These sessions still live, and in them he reinforces the idea that each of us does create our own reality. Both can be found in Chapter 1 of The Individual and the Nature of Personal Reality, A Seth Book.

From Session 610 for June 7, 1972: “You always know what you are doing, even when you do not realize it. Your eye knows it sees, though it cannot see itself except through the use of reflection. In the same way the world as you see it is a reflection of what you are, a reflection not in glass but in three-dimensional reality. You project your thoughts, feelings, and expectations outward, then you perceive them as the outside reality. When it seems to you that others are observing you, you are observing yourself from the standpoint of your own projections.”

And from Session 613 for September 11, 1972: “Interactions with others do occur, of course, yet there are none that you do not accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions. This applies in each area of your life. In your terms, it applies both before life and after it. In the most miraculous fashion you are given the gift of creating your experience.”

AFTER THOUGHTS

What role do we play in shaping each other’s lives and experiences. For example, My wife, Sandra, brings me the right book or says the right thing when I need it. My son, Evan, does something to motivate me when I need that, too, etc.

Expanding this point of view further, I wonder if Jane could have set up her relatively early demise (54) as a highly probable, or possible, event before life? In choosing her parents, she chose certain genetic and psychological predispositions (see notes from Jane and Rob’s book Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Volume I). Did she realize ahead of time (before life) that if and when she started to deliver this material, there would be no practical way to stop? Would illness and her early demise also protect her from the demands and expectations of a demanding public? Would illness serve as a graceful way to bow out of a lifetime that for too long would be occupied with intense creative effort? These are all great questions that apply to us all. We all have our own thoughts and inclinations that determine how and when we die. (See: Rebecca Writes Her Own Last Chapter)

Pete – https://realtalkworld.com

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having (creating) a human experience. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin