“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Seth gave so many sessions that were devoted to my own physical condition that I finally became embarrassed and confused: The sessions were obviously terrific—why couldn’t I put them to more practical use?

(9:10.) Seth couldn’t lead my life for me, of course. He couldn’t lead other people’s lives for them (underlined), either—yet through the years I began to feel a greater and greater sense of responsibility for people with physical problems who wrote requiring Seth’s aid, or mine. Their needs—and my own—seemed to blot out the great hope that Seth could and did offer: the infusion of understanding and comprehension that could clear away the old belief patterns that held the individual in bounds.

Since the later 1960s, when my own troubles began, I stubbornly resisted medical assistance. If I had broken a leg I would have gone to a doctor to get it set. I felt that I could handle my particular kind of difficulty alone. (Long pause.) The symptoms were obvious enough: stiffness, slowing down of motion, and general lack of mobility. I could keep track easily enough, I thought, of my own progress as I worked directly with my body, without drugs to confuse the issue, and with no one else between me and the reality I had so cunningly created. How else could I really learn anything? The more middlemen that I entertained between my physical condition and my personal beliefs, the more confused I thought I’d be.

(Long pause at 9:21.) I’m not sure where I drew the line. If I’d felt I was suffering a heart attack, for example, I knew I would rush to the hospital, but this was a chronic condition. The diagnosis—which I mentioned in my first session (on April 1)—gave a pinpointed, specific cause: a severely underactive thyroid gland, a situation that in no way contradicts Seth’s own larger interpretation of my physical state.

“Actually,” she continued much more emphatically now, as we discussed her rather mild comments about the other Seths, “I’m deeply outraged that some people who considered themselves ‘followers’ of mine or Seth can so easily fool themselves when they claim to be speaking for Seth—be so blind to their own motives, or not recognize the fact that they’re taking advantage of people. They’re also using my work to validate their own….”)

This whole miniature tempest is almost enough to make one wonder: How come those other people made their “Seths” known after Jane began to speak for her Seth, and to publish the Jane-Seth material? Being inspired to use one’s own abilities is a perfectly understandable development that we can be very happy about. But to claim to speak for Jane’s Seth per se, as a means of expression, is quite another thing….