1 result for (book:deavf1 AND heading:"essay 9 monday may 31 1982" AND stemmed:chosen)
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
She learned of the concept of sin through her intense early involvement with the Roman Catholic church. It’s easy to see how, in Jane’s case at least, the church’s teachings about sin began to grow as the innocent child started protecting her spontaneous natural mysticism—that prime attribute she’d chosen for exploration in this life. I don’t think her “sinful self” could have risen to such prominence without feeding upon those repressions, clamping down more and more within the psyche as the years passed, continuing its misguided but “well-meaning attempt to protect the creative self … to keep a hand of caution on its course lest the centuries of men’s belief in sin carried a true weight that I shared but could not comprehend.” And so, of couse, the sinful self’s own overreactions, although carried out without “malice,” became themselves a portion of Jane’s long-range learning challenges this time.
[... 16 paragraphs ...]
Even if those sessions can’t be quoted in these essays because of the obvious space limitations, I can note that Jane and Seth each continued to develop the themes already laid down in the sessions that have been presented. What they really signify for the long term is (as I wrote in the essay for April 16) a continuing program of intense study for Jane and me—and yes, for Seth, too—as we seek to better understand our chosen commitments in our present physical lives. Our questions reflect those that everyone has, whether consciously or unconsciously—and among them is that eternally human “Why?” behind each event that we know. The material in the sessions is exhilarating, painful, enlightening, perceptive, frustrating, and maddening by turn—and sometimes, it seems, all of those things at once. We’d like to publish much of it, even though it’s hardly all flattering, and even though some of it, because of our ordinary human limitations, may not be very useful in everyday life. For if the information arouses such mixed emotions in Jane and me, surely it will do so in others too, serving as an impetus or goad to learn more even while it highlights one’s strengths and weaknesses. You create your own reality. The anger I’d felt at Jane and myself when she began recording her sinful-self material (see the essay for April 16) has long since dissipated. I won’t claim that residues of it may not be buried within my psyche (and within Jane’s), but it’s very difficult to stay mad when one agrees with the simple but most basic and profound idea that you do create your own reality.
At times Jane still becomes depressed, just as she still dozes in her chair. While at work in my own writing room I occasionally hear her talking to herself as she sits at her card table in the living room, just down the hall: I’ve learned that on such occasions, she’s asleep and often dreaming aloud, solving the psychological equations continually arising among the levels of her psyche as she pursues her chosen learning processes. I help her as much as I can. While I spend all of this time working on these essays for Dreams, I’m always afraid I’m leaving her alone too much. Jane does get lonely, she says.
Of course these essays reflect our particular chosen stances in life, both with and without the Seth material. I know that to some we’re sure to have appeared slow in putting to use much of the material, but in a most basic respect we’re way ahead in the situation: If we hadn’t almost instantaneously begun to encourage the flow of information from Seth when Jane started to express it some 18 years ago, and to write it down, then it wouldn’t even exist—at least in its present form. So we do take credit for doing some things right. Learning experiences can show themselves in a vast number of ways, then, and independently of sequential time, too; and if Jane and I don’t like certain aspects of the realities we’ve created, we can try to change them, together and separately.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]
It seems that once again we must learn the hard way that in Jane’s case any improvements we achieve are going to come from within ourselves (for I’m certainly as involved in and “responsible” for her illnesses as she is). That such feelings are rearoused in us at this time is hardly coincidental in view of our lifelong habits and belief systems; our tendencies toward secretiveness and our desires to be as self-sufficient as possible—even with Jane’s very dependent situation. Different modes of behavior don’t fit our chosen courses of action in physical life “this time.” Once again I note that in my opinion Jane’s dependency represents, at least in part, a search for a “redemption” that encompasses other motivations and realities than those concerned with “just” our temporal lives; that indeed, her impaired state grew out of her mystical nature itself (but was hardly caused by it!).
[... 11 paragraphs ...]