“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We finally held our first “new” Seth session last Monday evening, on April 12. It was short but, as I expected it would be, excellent. We were pleased to get it for, as I told Jane, if ever we’re to understand all of the events in our lives that led to the hospital experience, we must call upon every ability at our service. And even though this is a personal session, still I think it contains clues that apply to all of us. Jane went into trance as easily as ever, but her Seth voice contained the same underlying tremor I’ve noticed on a number of occasions since she’s returned home. Remember that in the following excerpts Seth—who claims to be discarnate—calls Jane by her male “entity name,” Ruburt, and thus “he” and “him.”)

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.)

He (Ruburt) need not try to be the perfect self, then, the superimage—and in fact to some extent he found himself the supplicative [self], knocking upon creaturehood’s earthly door, as any creature who found himself wounded through misadventure might ask aid from another. He found a mixed world, one hardly black or white, one with some considerable give-and-take, in which under even the most regrettable of circumstances there was room for some action, some improvement, for some … creative response. The rules of the game have therefore been automatically altered. The issues are clearer, dramatically etched.

(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].

We do not want long drawn-out discussions of why and what exactly happened, simply to understand the dynamics of the activity. Ruburt can work with the self-image he has now. It is imperfect, but it is pliable and willing to change.

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.

If earlier, however, Ruburt had the erroneous idea that he was going too fast—or would or could—and had to restrain himself and exert caution, now he received the medical prognosis, the “physical proof” that such was not the case, and in fact that the opposite was true: He was too slow. If our words could not convince him, or his own understanding grasp the truth, then you had the “truth” uttered with all of the medical profession’s authority. And if once a doctor had told him years ago how excellent was his hearing, the medical profession now told him that his slowness (his thyroid deficiency) had helped impair his hearing to an alarming degree.

(Long pause at 7:46.) If Ruburt once found himself imagining that he must be strong and perfect enough to help solve everyone else’s problems, now he found himself relatively helpless and “undefended”—that is, his physical condition put him in [such a situation]. The superperfect, impractical self-image simply fell away. It could not survive such a situation.

(7:50.) So contrary to its own beliefs, and helpless or not, Ruburt was holding his own….

(Long pause at 8:01.) In a manner of speaking, the sinful self created the superhuman self-image that demanded so much, and it encased Ruburt’s body as if in concrete. Well, that image cracked and crumbled in the hospital experience, leaving Ruburt with his more native, far more realistic image of himself. It is one he can work with. Do, when you can, look over my “magical approach” material. Ruburt kept turning down his thermostat, so to speak. Now his desires and intents have set it upon a healthy, reasonable setting, and the inner processes are automatically activated to bring about the normal quickening of his body, as before his intent led to the body’s automatic slowness.

After the session I began to wonder what Jane’s “sinful self” would have to say now, in comparison to the material she’d received from it in June 1981. During that fervent bout of activity her sinful self had explained and defended its actions most eloquently throughout some 36 closely handwritten pages. Both of us had been appalled at the revelations coming through Jane’s pen, even if we did grudgingly admit that we understood, intellectually at least, many of the points that self made. I’d grown very angry as the material unfolded—angry at that portion of Jane’s psyche for clinging so tenaciously to such a set of beliefs, for whatever reasons, and angry at myself for not understanding any better than she did their extent and depth, and just how damaging they could be in ordinary terms. I’d also been reminded of material Seth himself had given a few weeks earlier, in a very important private session on April 16: “Many of Ruburt’s beliefs have changed, but the core belief in the sinful self has been very stubborn. (To me:) While you do not possess it in the same fashion, you are also tainted by it, picking up such beliefs from early background, and primarily from your father in that regard….”