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Speaking of Jane Roberts: Remembering the Author of the Seth Material

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This book is a must read for all hard-core Seth fans. Sue Watkins, who was very close to Jane Roberts, writes like a dream, frankly and honestly, no holds barred. One of the most difficult things for most of us to understand (those of us who have been reading and utilizing Seth's concepts for years), is how Jane could have lived and suffered so long with the debilitating effects of rheumatoid arthritis. How, we want to know, could she write those books about creating your own reality, and yet fail so miserably with her own health? With a great deal of compassion and understanding, not to mention 20/20 hindsight, Sue peels away the layers of Jane's psyche and reveals the woman who was the true "mystery person" behind the Seth material. We realize, as we read this memoir, that we knew and understood very little about this amazing woman, and we come away with a lot more compassion for ourselves and our own struggles with our core beliefs. I highly recommend this book, and I will re-read it every time I get discouraged and impatient with myself for hanging on to negative beliefs of my own.

For some fans of the Seth Material, Jane Roberts is a religious figure. For over 20 years, she had the privilege of being in intimate contact with a highly evolved entity named Seth, out of which came a body of spiritual teaching that has deeply influenced the lifes of many.

Religious devotion, unfortunately, does not necessarily bring out the best in us. Visit a Seth discussion board, and you will immediately find some people who are not only looking for answers for themselves, but for everyone else as well. Who will start fights over who is right and who is wrong. That's how religious orthodoxy always starts; give it a few centuries, and you will have religious wars and the holy inquisition.

At least that is what Jane Roberts was always afraid of - that she would become a religious icon and put on a pedestal, and Seth's message an object of devotion in itself, instead of just an aid to the individual for personal empowerment.

Sue Watkins' book is a great antidote to the poison of religious organizing. It shows Jane Roberts as simply an imperfect, complicated human being - a woman who smoked way too much and loved vulgar jokes. Who happened to channel a spiritual teacher named Seth. And who was a gifted artist in her own right.

Speaking of Jane Roberts is an insightful book that provides some much needed perspective on the woman who gave us the Seth Material. It was not exactly what I expected, meaning that Sue did her job well.

A long time ago it seems, Susan Watkins published her two excellent books on Jane Robert's ESP class in Elmira New York called "Conversations I & II". In those books, Watkins described in a clear and warm manner her and other classmates experiences with Jane Roberts and the many times Seth spoke during those classes.

Sue Watkins is back with yet another excellent book about primarily her friendship with Jane Roberts, her own psychological differences and insights given the relationship she shared with perhaps the greatest medium our century has known outside of Mrs. Piper or Pearl Curran.

One of the hallmarks of Susan Watkin's writing is her remarkable candour and detail in describing her own feelings and experiences with Jane Roberts, and some rare and exciting excerpts from Jane Roberts own personal journals. The book, as was Conversations I & II flows evenly and clearly, providing a unique and solid style that delivers a clear vision of Sue Watkins friendship with Jane and a most candid and mesmerizing chapter about the last time she met with Jane Roberts, as Jane found herself confined to a hospital for many months before her death.

For anyone who has read the Seth Material, and would like more insight into the woman who helped bring it all about, this book is a definite buy IMHO. In addition, the accounts of Susan Watkins own life, and how it intertwined with Jane Roberts are most fascinating and interesting, and deliver a human and "honest" style and feeling to the entire book.

Marshall McLuhan coined the famous phrase, "The medium is the message." As I began reading through Seth's books and Jane's books, I often thought how aptly this applied to Jane.

It seemed to me that Jane often fought fiercely to preserve her independence from Seth. While I admired her intellectual integrity, I felt that in holding to it so rigorously, she was actually missing out on some of the benefits of applying Seth's ideas in her daily life while having Seth around to coach her.

Still, it was seemed apparent to me that she had expanded her use of the inner senses tremendously from reflecting on Seth's ideas. That in itself was a testament to the material's validity and I used to point this out to others.

The death of Jane shocked and saddened me and I suppose I had the same reaction as many readers, "Couldn't Seth have done something? What was the point of the Seth Material if Jane couldn't use it to heal herself?"

That was only a knee jerk reaction though. I discovered Seth in 1973 and it only now that I am beginning to integrate it into every aspect of my life. I knew how difficult the translation of idea to behavior was and is.

Reading THE WAY TOWARDS HEALTH provided a sense of closure for me about Jane's death, as it laid out what had transpired in the last days.

SPEAKING OF JANE however, helped me UNDERSTAND Jane's death. It painted in stark relief, the beliefs that Jane held dearly to, which manifested her condition and death.

No biography could have done that in the same way that this memoir did. Life is not a series of events, it is an interactive dance between thoughts and the experiences that flow from those thoughts. SPEAKING OF JANE, for me, put the Seth Material into perspective.

Seth SOUNDS nice. His ideas FEEL good. But they also happen to be the governing dynamics of experience. Unless I act as if what Seth taught MATTERS, in the moment, his ideas are only a comforting bedtime story.

For me, Sue's books are an integral part of the Seth material and SPEAKING OF SUE, an indispensable illustration of the incredible value of applying the lessons of don Seth to every aspect of my personal journey.

This book is a brilliant, poignant memoir of Jane Roberts, sad at times, but with tremendous beauty and clarity shining through. There is so much meaty information in it, many interesting anecdotes and so forth, that I already consider it to be a necessity for anyone interested in the work of Jane, Rob, and Seth. Susan Watkins shares with us her memories (and others' memories, as well) of Jane the WOMAN, not exclusively focusing on Jane as "trance medium" for Seth. What emerges is a stunning portrait of Jane, very well written and attention-holding throughout. I hope you'll check it out.

I really liked this book, I thought it was great to learn more about Jane's life outside of her mediumistic activities, and there is something about Ms. Watkins's style that I have always liked from her previous Seth/Jane-related books, CONVERSATIONS WITH SETH, and DREAMING MYSELF, DREAMING A TOWN. I especially
appreciate the rather generous endnotes in the book, which are
almost a small book in themselves, and the exquisite attention
paid to detail therein.

Sue has a very humorous style at times, too, I got a kick out of
the part where she recounts the time she stayed over Jane's place during the Elmira Flood in the early 70's. She spoke of bringing along a lazy boyfriend with her to stay over Jane's (he was also flooded out at the time), and how the boyfriend just hung around Jane's all day writing an "epic poem" about the flood, while Sue worked her behind off for hours at her own apartment trying to clean the terrible mess that the flood made there. After they left Jane's place in a matter of weeks, Jane had Sue over to discuss how the man was an obviously wrong choice of boyfriend for Sue, but Jane still tried to throw in a few polite remarks about the guy, including that she and Rob really enjoyed some little Cornish hens that the guy cooked for them, and Jane went on and on saying how they ate those little Cornish hens as leftovers for days. Sue was astonished hearing this, and writes something very funny like "since I was the one who bought the <EXPLETIVE> hens in the first place, I was mystified by Jane's rapture over it all." I laughed and laughed at that line!!

Also, there are incredible little surprises in the book, such as
Sue's "probable memory" or something similar, where she tells
about a "memory" she has of Jane and her discussing T.S. Eliot's
poetry, and then in a burst of exuberant playfulness, Jane running down the hallway and leaping into the air to touch a lightbulb on the ceiling or something while yelling out a line from Eliot. What Sue goes on to explain there is that such a "memory" could never really have happened in real life, since the Jane she knew was not physically able to do such a thing for almost the entire time she knew her (as even though Jane's arthritis was not really dire and incapacitating until the late 70's, even in years prior to that, Jane could never really have leapt into the air in such a fashion, as she was already quite stiff and partly immobile from as early as the late 60's).........so Sue muses where this supposed "memory"
comes from and she says "I am haunted by a memory that I
cannot possibly have".............as if it was a memory of a probable version of Jane...............

All in all, the memoir really surprised me when I first read it,
because while it was still forthcoming, I imagined and imagined
what it might contain, and I expected reading lots of scenes of
mystical experiences between Jane and Sue, like psychic flashes
from Jane and so forth, special personal things that Seth told Susan, etc., and in reality, even though these things did occur on a few rare occasions, they were really not part of what occured between the two women. And I think that some others were disappointed with the book, because it really broke down their "exalted" concepts of Jane's life. I think Jane was great, a real original, but many people who have read her work, have put her on a sort of pedestal, and the book really shows that she did not at all have what some would consider a peachy psychic life! But again, I loved this book, even without my imagined series of numerous "mystical encounters" between the 2 women. (Not that they didn't have some psychic experiences between them, as Sue detailed in CONVERSATIONS WITH SETH and elsewhere, but definitely not to the level of constant mystical conversations and so forth. That is what makes this book spectacular for me, it shows the REAL life of Jane, as interpreted through Sue's close vantage point of course, but a life that is indeed as wonderful and meaningful & troubling and puzzling at the same time, as our own lives surely are too. It shows for any who might think otherwise, that Jane was someone whose intellect and grace led to the Seth development, and not as some otherworldly eccentric "channeler" figure with no normal day-to-day life slipping into trance states to speak for "JESUS" or whoever..........)

All in all, I think any reader of Jane Roberts's books would really get a lot out of this memoir, and for those who have not read Jane's work yet, this memoir is a good introduction to her life that should in turn make you curious to delve into her own books as well! This book shows that Susan Watkins is a talent and a half, and definitely "a Writer with a capital W", as Jane Roberts herself used to tell her she should strive towards. Do give it a read!

Were it not for the effort of Sue Watkins in "Conversations with Seth", fans of Seth, Jane, & Rob who never sat in on an ESP class wouldn't know that Seth referred to them as "the black sheep of the universe", just as scholars would not know that Dr. Samuel Johnson kicked a stone and remarked: "I refute Berkeley, thus!" were it not for James Boswell. Not merely the amanuensis, Ms. Watkins is an important part of the Seth phenomenon, as this memoir of Jane makes clear. It is important for readers to understand why the progenitor of the create-your-own-reality perspective in our time could talk the talk but didn't walk the walk, so to speak, and though Ms. Watkins does not provide the answer in 25 words or less, she does present a very human, non-idealized picture of Jane that should help resolve the question. She has a journalist's respect for facts and an engaging, conversational style. Readers can hope that Rob will eventually publish the "Through My Eyes" memoir Seth suggested he write 28 years ago, and then we will have a more or less complete literary portrait of this remarkable personality by those intimates best qualified to tell the tale.

A vital perspective on Roberts and the Seth Material; I see now, as I had only glimpsed in the Seth books, how compulsively disciplined Jane and Rob were--very far from Seth's ideas about spontaneity--how severe their lives were, in terms of diet and overall lifestyle, although not in a classical "spiritual" way (obviously they drank and smoked, for example); how much more important was Jane's view of herself as a writer, than as a psychic. I'd never have guessed that Sue didn't like Jane's poetry much, something she apparently didn't have the nerve to write while Jane lived.

There are none of the eye-popping psychic experiences that make the other books such a blast to read, and make Jane's life seem so glamorous--in fact it's the difficulties and sadness and illness that come to the fore. How could the woman who brought us Seth's teaching have been so distant from it, in many ways, herself?

But it's not a biography--it's one friend's view of a woman who, perhaps, no one (other than her beloved husband Rob) really knew all that well. How I long to see two books published: Robert Butts' long ago proposed book on the phenomenon, "Through My Eyes", and Jane's unfinished autobiography "From This Rich Bed", which someone (are you reading this, Sue?) should put into some kind of usable form while people who knew Jane are still alive. This book gives only a glimpse of the brilliant woman who brought us the Seth Material but who was not the Seth Material, but a sad, funny, insecure human just like the rest of us.

This is a truly touching and revealing memoir of an extraordinary life-that of Jane Roberts. In reading the Seth books, I never had a true feeling for who Jane was as a person. Not that she ever seemed merely a conduit for Seth, but his teachings always took precedence in the writings. In Sue Watkins' book we are able to see the difficulties and doubts Jane experienced, the often very painful and austere life she lead (for example the issue of food, which Jane seemed to deny herself - eating a peanut butter sandwich, but not wanting to be seen doing so; or the belief that travel was a folly that could not be tolerated because it took her away from her writing desk). But the earthy humor and joy of Jane also comes through - dancing, smoking, drinking and hanging out at the local taverns. While I'm not sure the author really knew Jane on an intimate level (and says as much many times throughout this book), it is certainly the most revealing look we are likely to have of Jane Roberts and her extraordinary accomplishments during a particular lifetime. I believe this book will have more meaning for the reader who is already familiar with the Seth material.

Had anyone else besides Sue Watkins written this book, I probably never would have read it. I trust Sue Watkins writing, her books Conversations With Seth: The Story of Jane Robert's ESP Class Volume I and II were among my favorite Seth books. Reading them, I felt as if I got a real sense of who Jane, Rob, and Seth really were, as well as a taste of the ESP class experience.

I hoped that Sue would open similar doorways into the persona of Jane, and I was not disappointed. Jane Roberts was an extremely complex woman, motivated as much by her fears as she was by her creative desires. Sue portrays a (sometimes painfully) honest picture of Jane. Not the Goddess Jane that many fans sought after, but the flesh and blood human being that tried to hide many of her frailties from even her closest friends. 

As a journalist, Sue Watkins does an excellent job of presenting an in-depth look into Jane's life, while remaining objective enough to let the reader draw his/her own conclusions as to "why" Jane chose the life (and death) that she did. There is a tapestry of beliefs which are revealed in the text; a portrait of Jane which is sometimes painful to read, but well worth the effort.
This review first appeared in the Conscious Creation Journal