Seth wasn't just presenting an evocative theoretical framework through which we could view reality; he was initiating a new and superior philosophical system that explained reality more clearly than science or religion.  It was as simple as that, I decided.  So I simply had to shake off those old beliefs for myself and for my readers as well.

I wasn't making any extraordinary claims!  My experiences were psychological facts, regardless of the interpretations that might be made about them.  So-called paranormal events had been reported for centuries by quite normal persons.  People throughout history had recorded instances of precognition, telepathy, out-of-body experiences and all such related phenomena.  That data represented its own kind of evidence—an evidence that science had no right ignoring.


They were at the very least indications that man might possess a highly sophisticated network of inner communication.

I wasn't particularly happy with the thought of telling the world that I'd grown up on welfare, or that "ladies of the evening" often served as our housekeepers when their usual places of business were closed down in my original home town of Saratoga Springs, N.Y.  That background was once as much a part of my life as my experiences today are, though, and it was from that living framework that the Seth sessions eventually emerged.

Her parents divorced when she was an infant and soon afterwards her mother became bedridden with rheumatoid arthritis, the same condition to which Jane would eventually succumb.  ("I'd never seen her walk," Jane later remembered.)  Raised in the Catholic Church, Jane was sent to an orphanage run by nuns while her mother was hospitalized with the disease.  Jane lived there for nearly two years.

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.

When I wrote poetry, the universe seemed to talk to me.  Sometimes I talked back, and on rare occasions we spoke at once.

She'd become more and more irrational, and I suspected even then that the pills for pain she took contributed.  Anyhow, I went to the welfare authorities while my mother was in the hospital, said that I was leaving, insisted that the authorities provide the care for her that I couldn't, and left for California—where my father lived.

I left with a fellow student who had just graduated.  I'd been dating him regularly.  He had a motorcycle, and the two of us took off on it.  It was 1950.  We crossed the continent on that cycle, and crossed it several times later by car.

She and Walt returned to Saratoga several months later, married ("We didn't dare show our faces in town otherwise") and Jane took a variety of jobs, including one as Society Editor for the Saratoga newspaper and another as a supervisor in a radio factory.


Then in 1953, while "cutting up, dancing and raisin' hell at a party," she met Robert F. Butts, an artist who was working on the Mike Hammer comic strip with someone Jane knew and had shown up at the party as a lark.  Jane was twenty-four and married; Rob was a thirty-four-year-old bachelor.


"I took one look at him and that was it," Jane told me years later.  "Not long after that—I mean, we hadn't even kissed or touched or anything—I told him, 'I'm leaving town and I'm leaving with you or without you, so make up your mind.'  And Robbie felt the same, and he did the honorable thing, you know, and talked with Walt, and told him that we were leaving, and you know, Walt was relieved . . ."


She and Rob drove to Marathon, Florida, to file for Jane's divorce, and were married on December 27, 1954.

. . . what did I have to lose?  (It wasn't until much later that I remembered that another of Rob's suggestions had launched me into fiction in the first place.)

So we began.  We settled on the Ouija Board first, because it seemed the least complicated of our various experiments.  Our landlady found a board in the attic and we borrowed it.

They sat in a fully-lighted room, both of Jane's hands on the pointer, one of Rob's hands free to write down whatever they might get.  Much to their surprise and embarrassment, the pointer quickly began spelling out messages, claiming to come from a man named Frank Watts who'd lived in Elmira and died in the 1940s.  

The pointer began to spell out the answer to Rob's question.

IN SOME SUBMERGED MANNER, ALL FRAGMENTS OF A PERSONALITY EXIST WITHIN AN ENTITY, WITH THEIR OWN INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS . . .

The pointer paused.


. . . Actually it was the words that pushed at me—they seemed to rush through my mind.  In some crazy fashion I felt as if they'd back up, piles of nouns and verbs in my head until they closed everything else off if I didn't speak them.  And without really knowing how or why, I opened up my mouth and let them out.  For the first time I began to speak for Seth, continuing the sentences the board had spelled out only a moment before.

"You will reincarnate whether or not you believe that you will," Seth began, smiling.  It is much easier if your theories fit reality, but if they do not, then you do not change the nature of reincarnation one iota."

As I went rummaging through my past, I was mildly shocked when my own notes reminded me that Rob and I had been married almost ten years before the Seth sessions started.  From my 1979 vantage point those early years seemed strangely telescoped and shortened, so that I thought of our marriage in one breath and the first Session started in the next—as if there were hardly any time between.  But I know we spent most of those years in our Water Street apartment, both working, painting and writing steadily, buying nothing on credit so that we'd have peace of mind, concentrating on our work.  We went without a car for several years.  We had freedom within the system, we figured, as long as we kept our wants in line.  So even though we just had enough to get by, we felt quite triumphant most of the time.  We were learning our crafts and supporting ourselves.  When I sold a story or Rob sold a painting, we knew that it was all worthwhile.

So I had all that behind me when the Seth sessions started late in 1963, and since then I've acquired those 4,000-some odd hours of trancetime, and more evidence of life's greater dimensions than I could reasonably expect.

. . . I discovered that psychics were either scoffed at, thought of as frauds, nearly idolized, or supposed to be all-wise and all-knowing — all attitudes that drove me up the wall.  For example, on tour to publicize The Seth Material, Rob and I were almost yanked out of a studio just minutes before we were to go on the air.  A secretary had been unable to establish the whereabouts of Raymond Van Over, the psychologist who wrote the book's Introduction.  The studio suspected that he didn't really exist and that we were "frauds."  Luckily, at the last moment, he was located.  We were allowed to go on the air.  Then, I was bewildered, embarrassed, and confused.  Now I wouldn't have gone on if they'd plied me with gifts.

But the fact is that I was very sensitive to criticism for the very good reason that often I still shared many of the beliefs that stimulated it.  Coming to psychic awareness, strongly gifted in that area, I still carried along with me the beliefs that I'd acquired from my own background and the culture of the times.  And I was always weighing my "new information" against the old.

In 1978, long after I'd married and divorced Ned Watkins (whom I met in 1968, at Jane and Rob's place), when I was putting together the proposal for Conversations With Seth, it was Jane's editor at Prentice-Hall who pointed out that in The Chestnut Beads, the main character/Jane-figure's child is named Sue Watkins!  Which of course hadn't meant a thing to me when I read it in 1963, or to Jane when she wrote it in 1957, or to either of us when we became friends in 1968.

She and I were not girlfriends, or even best friends, in the way those words usually suggest; the center of our common interests precluded that.  To me she was a creative mentor-comrade-mother figure who encouraged my writing and "psychic" abilities and demanded that I take them seriously.


. . . our mutual interests were almost exclusively focused on writing and "psychic" experiences, and in analyzing what those experiences might mean.

. . . Seth also stresses the even greater living art that we can make of our lives, and emphasizes that the creative abilities are devoted not just to specific arts and crafts, but to the entire framework of our lives.  Certainly in those terms, class was as creative as any art form, and it was a kind of psychic theater of the mind with its own dramatic episodes.

And class kept changing, as Sue's book shows.  People came and went through the years.  Sometimes the one-nighters and people passing through outnumbered the regulars.  We could fit only so many people comfortably in that one room, yet I tried to give as many people as possible the opportunity to hear Seth speak.  For that reason I'm amazed when on occasion I hear that some scientist believes that "the whole thing is a fraud," that there is no Seth; or conversely, that I encourage blind belief on the part of my "followers."   The fact is that Seth came through some 300 times over those eight years in full light, responding spontaneously to on-the-spot questions in a way impossible to prepare beforehand.  Though I made a special effort to admit any scientists, very few contacted us.  I think four or five psychologists visited class in that entire eight-year period, and two physicists.  They were great people: But it's too bad that more of their colleagues didn't join them.  Far more professionals contact us now, and we make an effort to see them when possible.  Often Seth comes through during such visits, but between 1967 and 1975, the classes provided a ready-made platform and format for such activity.

"I got all ready and said the sort of thing I thought I should say," Jane recalls, rolling her eyes humorously at the memory.  "I said, 'Spirits—move this table!  Spirits, move this goddamn table!"  And it really took off!  It danced all around the room, our fingers sliding all over the top of it."


"The table started giving messages to people, you know, on the one-tap-for-A scale, with somebody writing these all down . . ."

In the beginning, class interest was mostly concerned with what you might call "basics": discussions on the nature of identity, the "door" or envelope test experiments, table-tipping, life after death, reincarnation, healing.  Jane did occasional psychic readings, and she or Seth sometimes gave past-life impressions as they pertained to questions or remarks brought up in class—although Jane wouldn't allow Seth to come through in class for a long time: The first class session was Jane's 386th trance, in 1968, and was the first time she spoke for Seth without Rob there to take notes.

 
In 1971, a second "phase" of class began—initiated, I think, with the "secrets" sessions [when participants each told a secret] and carried through the reincarnational "dramas," mobility-of-consciousness exercises, the Alpha healing experiments, and, for many of us, a heightened awareness in the dream state.  Jane started speaking the Sumari songs and scenarios in November of that year; Seth Two appeared on the scene and observed that the "experiment" was continuing; and events were rapidly moving out of the realm of theory.

The third stage of class—although all of these stages slid easily into one another and were not obvious at the time—probably had its beginnings in the aftermath of the Flood of 1972, when Hurricane Agnes washed through the Chemung-Susquehannah River Valley, dramatically affecting the lives of everyone in its path.  That June 23rd, Jane and Rob stayed in their apartment with their paintings and manuscripts and the 50 notebooks of the Seth Material, alone in the neighborhood, as the swollen Chemung River crested ten feet deep on Water Street lawns.  When class resumed a month later, we began using Seth's tricky "belief assignments," plunging in depth into our individual reality systems—and, by inference, into mass reality as we know it.

The Deleted material, mentioned in Rob's notes throughout the published Seth books, refers to the sessions directed to private matters in Jane and Rob's life, or, on occasion, to friends and others who asked for advice.  Rob excised these sessions from the ongoing body of material and placed them in their own notebooks, and as such they form a powerful, intimate examination of the joint reality (as Seth often phrased it) created and lived by one couple—Jane and Rob—and thus demonstrate how each of us does the same.

I'm composed of your strong drives for creativity.  My purpose is to protect and direct your energies specifically in the areas of writing and painting.
 

I do not want you to go hungry, or to be unhappy.  I do not want you to be in want, but outside of that nothing else concerns me but your work.  
 
My methods have not brought about what I wanted, however.  Now you spend half your time trying to figure them out, and what is wrong with Ruburt—time that you should be working.