“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.”

“Part of me doesn’t want to contend with this material at all,” Jane wrote for her journal, “but last night I had one of the strangest, quite frightening experiences—all the odder because there are so few real events to hang on to. Very early after we went to bed I realized I was in the middle of a nightmarish experience, one terribly vivid emotionally yet with no real story line. I only know that the following were involved: a childhood nursery tale and a toy like the cuddly cat doll I had as a child, named Susie, and thought the world of. Anyway, the point is that the story … and there I lose it; I don’t get the connections. All I know is that I awakened myself crying, my body very sore, sat on the side of the bed and made the following connections from my feelings at the time.

“He began to search actually from childhood in a natural fashion toward some larger framework that would offer an explanation for reality, that bore at least some resemblance to the natural vision of his best poetry. I have said before that many creative people, highly gifted, have died young in one way or the other because their great gifts of creativity could find no clear room in which to grow. They became strangled by the beliefs of the cultural times.