“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt explained, after hearing about the automatic communications, that these were simply repressed elements of the subconscious finding needed outlet. He suggested that Dineen find herself a job, stop seeing psychics, and assert her own individuality and her own responsibility for action. Dineen believed that other people acted oddly toward her because they had all been hypnotized into doing so. If someone frowned at her, this was the result of hypnotic suggestion. All of this may sound exotic to some of you, and be only too real to others, but any time that you assign elements of your experience to exterior sources, you are really doing the same thing that Dineen did.

(10:29.) If you believe that you come down with a cold every time you are in a draft, you are using natural hypnosis. If you think that you must come and go at everyone else’s beck and call, then you are like Dineen, who believes that she must do what this “hypnotist” tells her to do. In her case Dineen gave up the responsibility for action and initiative, yet because one must act the reasons were assigned to another. Ruburt also pointed this out. Dineen asked for advice from me and again Ruburt said, quite correctly, “You must learn to stop depending upon others, to use your own common sense. You must stop trying to use one symbol against another, and look at your own life and your beliefs.”

(Pause.) Dineen is a well-educated woman of middle age with several grown children, financially at ease, possessing all of the things that money can buy. She called Ruburt, nearly in a frenzy — desperate, she said, for help. Since she has written Ruburt several times, he was aware of the situation. Dineen was convinced that she was being cursed, hypnotized, and had fallen under the domination of another.

Now the other individual has no power that Dineen does not possess. (Pause.) Dineen heartily believes in good and evil; so, being convinced that she was at the mercy of demoniacal forces, she began to pray. As Ruburt pointed out, however, the prayers themselves were merely a weak surrender to the idea that evil is so powerful. They were not based on any real belief in the power of good, but only upon a superstitious hope that if bad forces exist, good ones must also.

[...] The heart of the chain of events resulted in their meeting Miss Dineen on the sidewalk in front of Rubin’s bookstore as they were putting money into a parking meter. Miss Dineen told them they needn’t do so on a holiday, and the conversation among the three of them took off from there—culminating in Miss Dineen remembering that she knew us when Miss Callahan was alive, etc.—all of this after Carol and Fred had asked Miss Dineen if she knew us.

(These notes hardly do justice to the string of events that led to Carol and Fred meeting Miss Dineen—from the couple’s leaving Watkins Glen, motoring to Elmira, deciding upon how to find us, asking a policeman finally for directions to a book-store, going to the wrong bookstore—Rubin’s—just as Miss Dineen came out of the religious bookstore almost next door, Miss Dineen first directing them to 458 West Water, then remembering that we’d moved, etc. [...]

[...] Jane and I haven’t seen Miss Dineen except once soon after Miss Callahan’s death at least 10 years ago. [...]

[...] for the coincidence, so-called, of the meeting on the street between Miss Dineen and the couple is just too much as far as I’m concerned.

(Miss Dineen gave Jane information evidently confirming Seth’s prediction that April 15 would be a day of crisis for Miss Callahan. Without going into all the details about Seth, Jane learned from Miss Dineen that in the middle of that week, which would be on April 15, Miss Callahan’s condition became so bad that hospital officials insisted she be moved to a rest home as soon as possible. [...]

[...] At 8:35 two of Miss Callahan’s relatives knocked on our door: Miss Betty Dineen, an older woman who is a teacher, and a distant relative but close friend of Miss Callahan’s, and Miss Callahan’s nephew John. [...]

(Miss Dineen said that at times, even in the rest home, Miss Callahan will have brief periods of comparative lucidity.

(When Jane called the hospital on April 20, she talked to a nurse who did not know the details of Miss Callahan’s case, Miss Dineen said; otherwise we would have learned of the real circumstances of Miss Callahan’s removal much sooner. [...]

(John said Seth’s description of a younger man with a Slavic face and short prickly hair fits Bob Dineen, another salesman also present at the Rochester meeting. However Dineen’s hair, which was once brown or dark, is now gray. [...]