“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.

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.”

(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.

1. Seth’s idea that in their play children “try to imagine what death is like” certainly adds an intuitive dimension to my own activities as a child. “Cowboys and Indians” was our gang’s favorite game back in Sayre in the late 1920s, and as we roamed the nearby fields all of us made believe we killed our enemies and/or were killed ourselves. We had great fun, and used to play such games to the point of exhaustion.

I’ll also endorse Seth’s statement that children “are often quite aware of willing themselves sick to get out of difficult situations.” I remember very well doing that on certain occasions—usually to avoid some school activity—and that even then I was surprised because my parents didn’t catch on to what I was up to. (Getting well after the danger period had passed was no problem!)

Jane said I’d never told her about getting sick on purpose, although I thought I had. I asked her if she’d ever done that. “Sure,” she said. “I know that sometimes I made myself sick to get out of stuff like diagramming sentences and doing multiplication tables, in Catholic grade school. I was terrified of those things—I think it was in the fourth grade. I think I gave myself the mumps once, too.”

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.”