“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(9:25.) I still must have needed the doctors to tell me so. Seth was right: I was going too slow—not too fast, as I had feared. I had calmed myself down too far, disciplined myself overmuch, until my only hope was to change my course at once.

Doctors had terrified me as a child, when my mother was already bedridden with arthritis, and when I was diagnosed as having an overactive thyroid gland—an affliction that could lead, so my mother told me, to insanity and death. If the medical profession had had anything to do with casting that medical spell, then apparently it could be quite effective in removing it.

(Long pause at 9:35.) By last year, as my symptoms worsened, I began to feel that life’s frustrations outweighed its pleasures. Other annoying events were occurring in our private lives. The company that published my books, Prentice-Hall, was changing its structure and policy. My longtime friend and editor there, Tam Mossman, was considering leaving to work for another publishing firm. And—very troublesome to me—came the repeated news that various people were “speaking for Seth” publicly, and charging hefty-enough fees.

(9:43.) I felt that my work was being contaminated, and more, I was annoyed and disappointed by those readers who could apparently be so taken in by those other Seths. As he has said so many times, Seth speaks only through me, to protect the integrity of the material. And it is indeed that contract between him and me that always assures you of the authenticity of Seth’s work.

Concerning Jane’s understandable desire to protect her work, long ago she published some very clear statements about that. In Chapter Nine of The Seth Material (1970) she wrote: “Several people have told me that Seth communicated with them through automatic writing, but Seth denies any such contacts, saying that his communications will be limited to his work with me, in order that the integrity of the Seth Material be preserved.” And in her introduction to Seth Speaks (1972), she quoted Seth from the 510th session for January 19, 1970: “While my communications will come exclusively through Ruburt (Jane) at all times, to protect the integrity of the material, I will invite the reader to become aware of me as a personality….”

Even in God of Jane, which was published in 1981, Jane presented some relatively late material from Seth to show that he doesn’t independently communicate with others. The idea that he’d done so can be inspiring, however. In Chapter 20 of her book, see Session 876 for August 27, 1979. After explaining how a couple of women (among others) had recently claimed that he had been in contact with them, Seth stated: “Now, I did not communicate with those women—but their belief in me helped each of them use certain abilities.”