“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane has been taking time off from God of Jane and If We Live Again to work on the Introduction for Sue Watkins’s Conversation With Seth. Sue took the manuscript for Conversations with her when she went to Florida for the month with her son and parents. If those three members of her family are enjoying a vacation, Sue isn’t—but at least she’s working on her book in warm weather!

The thoughts of children give excellent clues as to mankind’s nature, but many adults do not remember any childhood thoughts except those that fit, or seem to fit, in with their beliefs about childhood.

They quickly learn to forget their parts in such episodes, so that later, when as adults they find themselves ill they not only forget that they caused the illness to begin with, but unfortunately they forget how to will themselves well again.

(10:05.) As I said, there are all ranges of suffering, and I am beginning this discussion, which I will continue now and then in between regular book dictation, in a very general manner. In times past in particular, though the custom is not dead, men purged themselves, wore ashes and beat themselves with chains, or went hungry or otherwise deprived themselves. They suffered, in other words, for religion’s sake. It was not just that they believed suffering was good for the soul—a statement which can or cannot be true, incidentally, and I will go into that later—but they understood something else: The body will only take so much suffering when it releases consciousness. So they hoped to achieve religious ecstasy.

If you deny yourself the direct experience of your own emotions, but muffle them, say, through too-strict discipline, then you can hurt others much more easily, for you project your deadened emotional state upon them—as in the Nazi war camps [men] followed orders, torturing other people—and you do that first of all by deadening your own sensitivity to pain, and by repressing your emotions.

Give us a moment…. That will be it for the evening. My heartiest regards to each of you. I have but one more point to make: Each person’s experience of a painful nature is also registered on the part of what we will call the world’s mind. Each, say, failure, or disappointment, or unresolved problem that results in suffering, becomes a part of the world’s experience: This way or that way does not work, or this way or that way has been tried, with poor results. So in that way even weaknesses or failures of suffering are resolved, or rather redeemed as adjustments are made in the light of those data.

“I’m wondering about that too,” Jane said. “But the heck with it. Maybe someday we’ll be able to use it in a book, but in the meantime I’m not going to worry about it. Maybe he’ll keep on with it like this, and it’ll end up in a book of its own someday. Who knows?”

Jane added that her group of playmates hadn’t engaged in the same sort of games that mine had. “We might have played dead now and then—you know, lain down and closed our eyes, but that would be all.” In fifth-grade history class, in the convent she’d been sent to because her mother was hospitalized for treatment of severe rheumatoid arthritis, Jane learned about Marie Antoinette, queen of France, who had been guillotined in Paris in 1793. “I used to play being her all by myself,” she said. “I’d be brave and scornful, knowing I was going to be beheaded—that sort of thing.”