“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!

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.

Your beliefs close you off from much otherwise quite-available knowledge concerning man’s psychology—knowledge that would serve to answer many questions usually asked about the reasons for suffering. Other questions, it is true, are more difficult to answer. Men and women are born, however, with curiosity about all sensations, and about all possible life experiences. They are thirsty for experience of all kinds. Their curiosity is not limited to the pretty or the mundane.

(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.