“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For all of your complaining (Seth told us with some humor at 8:56), you understand in rather good measure the decisions and actions that motivate your lives, so that Ruburt is more than usually aware of the manipulations that psychologically and physically lie just beneath the material usually carried by what is ordinarily called the conscious mind. Therefore, a kind of momentary gap appeared between his life and his living of it—a pause and a hesitation became obvious between his life and what he should do with it, as his condition showed just before the hospital hiatus.

I will help you still further understand those manipulations, for many people—most people—carry on the same kind of procedures while making important decisions as to whether or not they will continue life at any given time. But they hide the issues from themselves far more than Ruburt did.

(Long pause at 9:05.) Give us a moment…. The entire issue 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, being obvious at so many different levels of actuality. In such a way buried issues were forced into the light, feared weaknesses and inadequacies were actively played out where they could be properly addressed, assorted, and assessed. To whatever degree possible, given your time requirements, I will try to explain such matters.

(9:10.) To such a degree, of course, the affair was, then, therapeutic. Ruburt is now far more willing to make certain changes in his life than he was earlier, and he sees himself more as one of a living congregation of creatures—less isolated than before, stripped down from the superperfect (subconscious) model, and therefore no more under the compulsion to live up to such a psychological bondage. (All delivered with considerable emphasis.)

(9:18.) The arthritis situation is as I gave it (in a number of private sessions), but you are still faced with the medical interpretation of that situation, so that it is up to Ruburt to set it aside. He is returning to activity at his creative, naturally therapeutic pace, no longer afraid that he is going too fast—or will—but shown only too clearly that activity and motion represent the only safe, sane, and creative response [to life’s challenges].

Equally important is Seth’s suggestion that Jane no longer needs “to try to be the perfect self,” even on an unconscious basis. And, frankly, I want a good amount of additional material—from Jane and from Seth—on her progress in resolving her deliberations on the merits of continuing physical life.

Maybe I’d 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.

Now: The same process involving the thyroid gland has happened several times in his (Ruburt’s) life, and in each of those cases it has repaired itself.

(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. [In the first essay I wrote that according to her doctor Jane’s thyroid gland has ceased functioning, and that she has to take a substitute hormone daily for the rest of her life. But the doctor hadn’t expressed any idea at all that a thyroid gland could regenerate itself.]

It’s impossible to present here all of Jane’s own material on her sinful self—much as I’d like to—but shortly I do want to give portions of the first few pages to show readers how experiences from one’s very early years can sometimes have the most profound effects in later life. As will be seen, that material obviously raises as many questions as it answers, but right now we can do little more than touch upon the whole affair. We have years of work ahead of us as we search for understanding. 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 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 may think 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 chose 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.”

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.

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….