Rating: 
Summary: A lovely, deeply felt memoir...
Review: ...by somebody very close to the "action". Susan is a wonderful writer who has the gift of getting to the heart of things. If you are interested in Seth, Jane Roberts or mediumship/the life of an artist, you will not go wrong by buying this book. Some things in life are simply "instant classics" and this is one of them. I have read and re-read it many times.Buy it now.
Rating:
Summary: A lovely, deeply felt memoir...
Review: ...by somebody very close to the "action". Susan is a wonderful writer who has the gift of getting to the heart of things. If you are interested in Seth, Jane Roberts or mediumship/the life of an artist, you will not go wrong by buying this book. Some things in life are simply "instant classics" and this is one of them. I have read and re-read it many times. Buy it now.
Rating:
Summary: A candid account of a friendship with Jane Roberts
Review: 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. I would also like to mention, that it is OK to spend a lifetime writing about someone or some personality such as the Seth personality - who did speak so many profound and remarkable and wise things about our soul and reality itself. And that I'm glad that it was Sue Watkins who decided to supplement and her unique voice to what will, I am convinced, be material that will not be forgotten in the years and centuries ahead.
Rating:
Summary: A riveting memoir
Review: First and foremost this is a memoir, not a biography. It is an account of one person's relationship with another as seen from the writer's perspective. To me it is as much a window into Sue's world as it is into Jane's. It is difficult to be immersed in something as personal and meaningful as the Seth Material, replete with snatches of personal notes from Rob (Jane's husband), and not be interested in learning more about the people behind the material. Sue's previous book (Conversations with Seth) covers one aspect, this book, another. It is intimate, direct, and very honest in what Sue chose to reveal from her personal experiences. I am grateful for the opportunity she provided by publishing this book. If you have more than a passing interest in the Seth Material and have the familiarity of having read at least a few of the Seth books and would like to know more about the people behind them, you will probably enjoy this book a great deal. If you have expectations of what a "channeler" (yes I know this is NOT the best word choice!) should be like based on other popular "channelers" I invite you to read this book and have your preconceived ideas burned away by the very human person presented by Sue Watkins.
Rating:
Summary: A riveting memoir
Review: First and foremost this is a memoir, not a biography. It is an account of one person's relationship with another as seen from the writer's perspective. To me it is as much a window into Sue's world as it is into Jane's. It is difficult to be immersed in something as personal and meaningful as the Seth Material, replete with snatches of personal notes from Rob (Jane's husband), and not be interested in learning more about the people behind the material. Sue's previous book (Conversations with Seth) covers one aspect, this book, another. It is intimate, direct, and very honest in what Sue chose to reveal from her personal experiences. I am grateful for the opportunity she provided by publishing this book. If you have more than a passing interest in the Seth Material and have the familiarity of having read at least a few of the Seth books and would like to know more about the people behind them, you will probably enjoy this book a great deal. If you have expectations of what a "channeler" (yes I know this is NOT the best word choice!) should be like based on other popular "channelers" I invite you to read this book and have your preconceived ideas burned away by the very human person presented by Sue Watkins.
Rating:
Summary: A balanced, candid look at Jane Roberts and her legacy.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Sue Watkins provides excellent insight into the life of Jane
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: More Life after Life
Review: Here is a book which does more than just recount the facts - it brings the life of a memoir back into our concious. For all who learn from Seth's views the contrasts provided by this account of a friendship are invaluable. We are placed right at the centre of events. With direct invitation we participate by review of our own lives and actions, vis-a-vis the events of Jane and Susan's lives as they unfold, and with us, the readers, continue to unfold. This kind of overt complicity is usual between those who implicitly trust and love one another. With this book Susan has managed not only to celebrate a public life of such conscious complicity but in the wake of it made those who read it its intimate partners. The dictum to love one's neighbour is taken to mean that through our actions we affect others. That was and is the continuous life of Jane Roberts' writing.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent memoir of the life of a Truly Original Thinker
Review: 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!
Rating: 
Summary: Jane who?
Review: I was disappointed with this book. I learned more about Sue Watkins than I did Jane. Frankly, I don't believe that Sue really knew Jane that well to think that she could write a book about her. I read 1/4 of the book and put it down never to open it again.
| 
