“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I finished typing Monday evening’s session from my notes just in time to get ready for this one. In the meantime Jane called David Yoder at the hospital. To her surprise he sounded weaker than he had the last time she’d spoken to him, and at his request my planned visit tomorrow was put off until Friday afternoon.

Next, Jane quickly went over my recent batch of “Sayre-environment dreams,” as Seth called them. I’ve recorded six of those long and complicated dreams, set in my hometown, since December 22; in them I explored my various, sometimes contradictory beliefs about writing and painting, my relationships with society and the marketplace, and with my [deceased] father as he represented certain other beliefs. I’d recently asked Jane if Seth would comment.

Tonight Seth did comment—and very perceptively put all of the dreams together. “In your heart Sayre stands for your childhood,” he said in conclusion, “and to that extent, to you personally, for the childhood of all men. For, again to some extent, each man feels that somehow humanity as a whole was born at his own birth.”

(Long pause.) Discipline is a form of applied suffering, as discipline is usually used. People are not taught to understand the great dimensions of their own capacity for experience. It is natural for a child to be curious about suffering, to want to know what it is, to see it—and by doing so he (or she) learns to avoid the suffering he does not want, to help others avoid suffering that they do not want, and to understand, more importantly, the gradations of emotion and sensation that are his heritage. [As an adult] he will not inflict pain upon others if he understands this, for he will allow himself to feel the validity of his own emotions.

“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?”