“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I have difficulty believing it even when I write it—but eight months have passed since Jane held her last session for Dreams, the 928th, on November 12, 1980. The time has passed so quickly, it has been so filled with all kinds of personal, professional, and worldly events for us, that its motion is hard to visualize. During this period Jane gave two regular nonbook sessions [on November 26, 1980, and on January 5, 1981], plus 48 private sessions, so we’ve been busy! Out of that private total, Seth devoted 25 sessions, either completely or in part, to her “sinful-self” material. Jane delivered the introductory session on that subject on March 11 of this year, and I’ll be quoting from it in a note. The next 24 sessions on the sinful-self material came through in a concentrated block from April 14 to July 13. I also plan to excerpt several of those sessions for notes, and to quote a number of times from Jane’s personal journals for 1980 and 1981. In other words, these opening notes for the 931st session are going to be long ones.

On April 12 the space shuttle Columbia was launched into orbit around the earth, and I thought that Jane was complementing that obvious exploration of outside space by exploring inner space with the only vehicle she had available—her own mind. That same day, Seth agreed that her new book idea was a good one. Somewhere in here we received from our friend in California the photocopies I’d asked him to obtain, of the frontmatter for the Spanish-language edition of ESP Power. So the book was out in Spanish, we saw—but we were so preoccupied with Jane’s symptoms and related matters that we let the photocopies lie on a shelf. During this time, we had been often rereading Seth’s information on the sinful self as he’d given it on March 11. [See Note 9 for this session.] That material had deeply touched us. The result was that on April 14, the day Columbia landed, Seth initiated a long series of sessions on both Jane’s own sinful self, and that quality in general. The very next evening Jane allowed him to come through with some extremely important material.¹³

We had a hard time believing him when Seth told us the very next evening, on April 23, that Jane’s sinful self thinks her physical symptoms are necessary “for the personality’s own good”; that that self has no conception that its policies have become self-defeating; that, following Catholic and non-Catholic Christianity, it believes that suffering is good for the soul; that the idea of the flesh itself being graced is, to it, blasphemous.

Through April and into May, I had problems controlling my own anger and hurt feelings toward Jane’s sinful self as I came to better understand its mechanisms of operation. Obviously. of course, my feelings reflected upon the workings of my sinful self, or upon some similar psychological quality—for how could I be so involved with my wife’s challenges, for almost 26 years, without complementing them within deep portions of my own personality? My anger, Seth told me, was just the way not to react, and even amid the welter of my emotions I had to agree. Jane had refused to listen to that self of hers in earlier years. “The idea is in no way to accuse the sinful self,” Seth said on April 28. “It is instead to understand it, its needs and motives, and to communicate the idea that it was sold a bad bill of goods in childhood—scared out of its wits, maligned…. Ruburt’s entire group of symptoms do not follow any established pattern. They are the result of applied stress, exaggerated finally by feelings of hopelessness, and by some relative feelings of isolation.” And I was so struck by his reference to Jane’s hopelessness that once more I returned to the private session for April 15. See Note 13, in which I quoted Seth’s material on her search for value fulfillment—how, without the psychic breakthrough of the sessions, “Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence.”

Late in May we received from Prentice-Hall our first copy of Mass Events. We were both delighted and bemused that the book was published at last, especially when we considered that Jane had given the first session for it over three years ago [the 801st for April 18, 1977]. We felt that lifetimes had passed since then.

13. Seth, in the private session for Wednesday evening, April 15, 1981:

The session triggered my own associative processes several times. Almost at once I recalled a passage Seth had given in the session of the night before (on April 14), when he’d discussed my attitude toward religion in general and my own sinful self in particular:

Next, and certainly because of my concern for Jane, I recalled a session she’d given for Chapter 7 of Dreams. Checking, I found that it’s the 911th for April 28, 1980—which means, incredibly, that Seth gave it almost 15 months ago. Mainly he’d discussed one’s choice of genetic defects before birth, but to me portions of his material are very reminiscent of Jane’s situation:

I took those associations to mean that no matter what her evolving focuses in her present life, Jane should be as much aware of my reactions to her situation as she is of her own—that even though I’d worked out religious questions in a previous life, still this time around I had chosen to share with her a probable reality within which her physical symptoms, bound up as they are with the subject of religion, could occur. (But at the same time, I reminded myself, her great creativity had also found its modes of expression in spite of everything.) If, as Seth said on April 15, conflicts like Jane’s often stem from the gifted individual’s unrequited search for value fulfillment—even resulting in an early death—then that premise is at least consciously understandable. I’ve suspected for quite a while that something like this is operating in Jane’s case. It’s not that she perversely refuses to get well, even with all of the help Seth and I have tried to give her—and that she has even asked for—but that the deepest portions of her being in this physical life have other goals, toward which her nonphysical self and her physical symptoms are traveling together. Without such thinking, I was coming to feel, there could be little comprehension of my wife’s long-term challenges.