“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The essay form gave us chances for at least a minimal study of the various forms our creative learning experiences have taken to date. We quickly agreed that we’d been setting up the illness syndrome for years, yet the deep emotional shocks accompanying its physical developments seemed to come at us like attacking dark birds zooming in from another probable reality. We learned. We adjusted in ways that a few weeks previously would have seemed unbelievable to us—and, ironically, as must often happen in such situations, once we’d moved into our new joint reality, it appeared that those particular challenges had always been incipient for us.

She learned of the concept of sin through her intense early involvement with the Roman Catholic church. [...] 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.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] It’s very unsettling for us to learn that the prescribed medication isn’t doing its job after all. It is, I remarked somewhat bitterly, another sign of the frustrating, mixed results one must learn to expect, at least in some instances, from the imperfect practice of medicine. [...]

[...] Jane learned to refuse to strike back at the invalid Marie’s rage and sarcasm, to inhibit her spontaneity and impulses, and so habits of repression entered in. [...]

[...] I also had to learn that her literal cast of mind grows directly out of her mysticism, and that because it does, she can be quite impulsive. [...] Whatever reservations she shows—her conscious inhibition of impulses, for example—are learned devices that are literally protective in nature. [...]

[...] We’d made the conscious, joint decision during a time of crisis to seek certain kinds of help from skilled practitioners in the medical field, and we were willing to learn from them, even if those people were pretty certain to have belief systems very different from ours. (Well, I should add with a touch of a smile, at least we were more willing to learn in the beginning!)

Indeed, I didn’t learn that Jane had made the tape until five weeks later, after she’d returned to our hill house from the hospital: I found it on March 30, amid others in her writing room. [...]

[...] I learned to joke even as my backside swung perilously above the commode, while I hoped that its aim was true in the hands of the nurses and orderlies—and again I felt that long-forgotten camaraderie with people, and a growth within myself apart from my work, or what I did. [...]

[...] How else could I really learn anything? [...]

[...] That we believe such things speaks for our own brands of faith, then, and also signifies that Jane and I think we have much to learn. [...]

[...] But I don’t want to spend a lot of ‘time’ learning about those lives. [...]

[...] For us, the learning processes were there for the changing anytime we decided that a physical illness was “wrong.” [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] The challenge of our learning enough to initiate her recovery was still with us during that summer of 1981.