“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

While she contended with her physical difficulties and related questions, having to do with who and what Seth may or may not be, Jane continued to paint for relief. [See the opening notes for Session 928, in this chapter.] Her options had become several steps more limited once she no longer left the house. She could read and write, paint, have sessions, watch television, do a little simple housework, call or see a few close friends, and answer some of the mail. She seldom saw visitors. She no longer washed dishes or cooked at the stove. I became very uneasy at her struggling to get up on the high stool she needed to sit on at the kitchen sink. Like the sink, the stove was too high for her to reach while sitting in her chair, and, because she had to stretch across hot burners, too awkward and possibly dangerous for her to operate from the stool. She did do some cooking on a hot plate I placed on the kitchen table, where we often ate lunch and supper, but I also cautioned her to be careful while using that appliance.

“They were these: that the entire world with its organization was kept together by certain stories, like those of the Roman Catholic Church; that it was dangerous beyond all knowing to look through the stories or examine them for the truth, and that all kinds of taboos existed to keep us from doing this, since … on the other side, so to speak, there was an incomprehensible frightening chaotic dimension, malevolent; powers beyond our imagining; and that to question the stories was to threaten not just personal survival but the fabric of reality as we know it. So excommunication was the punishment, or damnation … which meant more than mere ostracism, but the complete isolation of a person from those belief systems, with nothing between him or her and those frightening realities … without a framework in which to even organize meaning. This was what damnation really meant. To seek truth was the most dangerous of well-intentioned behavior, then … and retribution had to be swift and sure.

“I can’t remember the events connected with the nightmare that gave rise to the feelings, but at the same time I was being assaulted or attacked by … a psychological force who wanted me to understand the danger of such a course. When I went back to sleep the entire thing would happen again. Once I think the title of a children’s tale appeared in the air in large block letters, the idea also being that outside of the known order provided by these stories, there were raging forces working against man’s existence. (The old idea of Pandora’s box comes to mind.)

“Ruburt broke through both psychically and creatively—that is, the sessions almost immediately provided him with new creative inspiration and expression, and with the expansions needed psychologically that would help fulfill his promise as a writer and as a mature personality. He was still left, however, with the beliefs in the sinful self, and carried within him many deep fears that told him that self-expression itself and spontaneity were highly dangerous.