“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We discussed that session thoroughly the next day, December 2, and Jane ended up defending herself from what I had written in some of my notes. She showed more animation than I’d seen her display for some time, and I was glad to agree that she made some good points; others I disagreed with. I asked her to type a summary of her remarks for inclusion with our next session. At the same time, I tried to make it easier for her to do the typing itself. I’ve made things for her before.² Recently she had been having trouble comfortably lifting her hands high enough to reach her typewriter as it sat upon either the oak table in her writing room, or upon her standard metal typing table. I took the time to build a lower, very solid table whose top rides just above her knees as she sits in her office chair; she can operate her typewriter much more easily at that lower level. She makes mistakes typing because her fingers aren’t working well, but is anxious to improve her accuracy through working. [Nor is her handwriting as steady as it used to be.] As she typed on December 3: “Rob just made a new wooden typing table, right height, etc, and I am trying it out now. It worked great, want to start up journal, want to start project… want to get sessions started up again too or tell myself so anyhow. “

Our program of discussing Seth’s material, as well as our own ideas—which included our taping suggestions for Jane to listen to daily—had come out of those sessions for December 1 and 3. Obviously, we were trying to encourage Framework 2 activity. I spent the next day rearranging all of Jane’s working paraphernalia in her writing room, following her directions, and that re-creation of her world helped also. “Rob and Seth started us on a new program and though we’ve hardly begun, I do feel some relieved more peaceful,” she typed in part on the morning of the 5th as she sat at her new low table, “yesterday i felt the place clicking about me. P.M. I did a little mail but didn’t really get into the notes which are to be a part of the program. My typing is still pretty poor but do know this will improve. I don’t feel any flow in these notes but I do feel a submerged flow rising and i do feel… centered, more content… as I get this far I feel a definite block of expression and some mild enough panic but recognize the fact that a feeling of repression came as I decided to do my notes… writing down at once and will tell rob.”

“I begin as best I can… read sessions,” Jane typed on December 7, as she recorded her efforts, and mine, at carrying out our program for her. We played the tape of suggestions we’d made. “I do feel a blockage of expression; my ass hurts typing—a sweet soreness of joints I sit on that brings tears briefly; yet it is a stretching sensation, same right arm. so much I’d like to write down,” she noted later in the day. For although we didn’t know how they’d done so, our suggestions had helped her tune into a number of dear images of her girlhood in her hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York: She’d seen herself at an amusement park—Kaydeross—located on the shore of Saratoga Lake, just outside of town; she’d seen herself “jumproping very young” in the recreation field across the street from the Catholic grade school she had attended; she’d seen and interacted with family members, all dead now. That night she had very vivid dreams.

Jane worked less and less as the holiday season approached, although on December 15 she gave her fourth private session; its most evocative subject matter—art and child psychology—is separate from our themes for Dreams. We saw only a few friends. I was busier than ever, however: running the house, preparing for Christmas, helping my wife in various ways, working on the earlier notes for Dreams and trying to accumulate some painting time. Jane didn’t do any more on her manuscript for Magical Approach, nor anything about obtaining the medical help she’d mentioned on the first of December. Our program of self-help gradually began to diminish, as had many of them before.⁸ Finally, in an effort to cheer up Jane one day as she sat idly at the typing table in her writing room, I tried a variation of a tactic that had worked so well for her inception of Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche almost six and a half years ago: This time, standing in back of her, I put my arms around her and rolled a clean sheet of paper into her typewriter—but here’s the note she wrote the next day:

“A dark morning. I feel a definite reluctance about myself and a merging of other feelings. The smell of the heat coming out of the air ducts is faintly comfortable as it blends with the still lingering odor of Rob’s varnish. Suddenly the sunlight splashes out of the sky. My body is sore, arms hurt as I type. Rob it seems to me is utterly silent in his studio. I think of the one experience in particular that I’d wanted to note down: Yesterday’s vision. Yesterday morning I felt a good deal like i do this morning; middling poor mood, sore body, yet aware of the need to break the spell, move about.

Things I’d
Like to do
soon:
Finish Seth book

(10:28.) This purpose or meaning does not exist apart from your own existence, however. You are a part of life’s meaning and purpose—but those purposes, “coming from” (long pause), coming from the source of your own being, are too great to be expressed or described within the structure of your personhood as you understand it. Such understanding is often experienced or sensed, however, sometimes as you are listening to music or when you are deeply stirred by emotion, and when you do not place a great distance between it and yourself.

What do I mean by such attention? Attention to the moment as it is presented. Attention to the table of rich reality as it appears before you. Attention to the kind of person you are, and to the loving appreciation of your own uniqueness. To attend to your life in such a fashion brings you into a clearer communication with the inner action of your own existence.

1. Eight weeks later, I’m presenting only a summary of my very long notes for this private session, which Jane held on Tuesday evening, December 1, 1981. The notes stemmed from the unexpected discussion we began at about 8 o’clock, a few minutes after Jane had told me she wanted to have a session on herself. I returned to the living room and found her leaning back on the couch, asleep—and with a lighted cigarette in her hand. A long cone of ash fell into her lap as she woke up with a start: “I never never do that when I’m here alone!” she exclaimed, chagrined. Yet she dozed again when I went out to her writing room after her office chair, which I use while taking notes for the sessions. I thought her sleeping after saying she wanted a personal session was a poor sign. Yet I think that in this session Seth reached core beliefs of ours that we have yet to fully grasp, let alone surmount. He can do better for us only if Jane allows him to, but after we’ve struggled for so many years I’m no longer sure that she can.

I’m afraid that I did most of the talking in our “discussion,” but once again we tried to view our lives in some sort of joint mental and physical perspective. We didn’t fight, or even argue. We never do, yet I said things that later I wished I hadn’t. Such regrets are inevitable, I suppose, but if I can tell my wife about the storms of consciousness that I think are so active in the Middle East, for example, then certainly I feel like discussing my feelings about our own challenges. Both of us are as concerned as ever about her situation. Jane’s feelings of panic, which she had today, and which I tried to help her through, generate their counterparts within me—no doubt about it. At times I couldn’t believe myself as I talked tonight, even while I was driven once again to think that on the deepest levels Jane’s mystical way is bringing her just what she wants. (In Chapter 9, see Note 13 for Session 931.)

I told her I think that on those levels she really doesn’t want to hold the sessions anymore, that we’re surrounded by clues to that effect, that such a strong part of her is now so against her psychic work, so afraid of its implications—of being swept away, of going counter to her early religious imprinting—that her fear has put her in an impossible position physically. Since she’s becoming more and more helpless, I said, we can hardly say we’re solving our challenges in ordinary terms. “And don’t tell me your present state means that you’re getting better, like Seth says, because you’re not,” I said. “You haven’t walked for how long?—two weeks over a year now, I think it is. Not even with your typing table. I’m aware that you may be coping with certain lifetime challenges through the psychic method, so the question becomes one of how far you want to carry the thing. In this probability I put physical survival first, obviously, but do you? Sweetheart, I’ll have to admit that sometimes I wonder….”

Jane listened to me go on and on: “I’m on the point again—very close—of refusing to help you with the sessions any longer. I know I’ve said that before, but this time I don’t know what else to do. If we don’t see some pretty drastic improvements within the next few sessions, you may end up talking to the wall if you want to have one, or into a recorder if you can operate it. I can’t stop you from speaking for Seth by yourself, or doing it with someone else, but I can refuse to encourage you myself.

“What I think about illness,” I said, “is that as a people we know so little about it consciously that we’re still literally in the dark ages in that respect. I’ve felt that way for a long time now—that our understanding of what human beings really are is minute at best. Seth offers the greatest insights I’ve ever heard, and I’m more grateful for those than I can say. I think it’s very dangerous to take too hard a position on anything we think we’ve learned as a species, for I can’t imagine that in future millennia we’ll ever cling to very much of it. In the meantime we’re groping around in the dark. To ask any one person to figure it all out now, and to prove it to the world and cure oneself at the same time, may just be asking too much. Learning about our abilities is a social and cultural affair, and you—anyone—need help. Lots of it. Only where do you get the help while trying to learn a few things?

“I don’t want to do that,” Jane said. “I wouldn’t mind trying some things on my own here at the house, like getting an eye, ear, nose and throat doctor here, or an orthopedist—but no hospital. But I’m shocked at what you’re saying about giving up on the sessions.”

I explained that lately I’ve been thinking about what can happen when a person chooses to be born with very strong gifts, but then discovers that for whatever reason or reasons he or she cannot use them, or has to pay a high price to do so. At first I thought it contradictory that such conflicts can arise within nature’s framework—then I realized that they must happen all of the time, and so, actually, are natural after all. I used to think that nothing could keep an individual from showing a great ability. Now, I told Jane, I realize that things are far from being that simple. The use or nonuse of an attribute can have as many ramifications as there are human beings who possess whatever version of it: ranging all the way from being completely buried in a life, to being simply left alone, used just “as is,” or thoroughly transformed in expression.

“I do admit that from your standpoint—or viewpoint—that it may be very difficult to accept some of the statements that I make [which] appear perhaps even to be directly contradictory to your observation of Ruburt on a daily basis, and to his own experience of himself.

But I was afraid as I thought of what could happen to her while she kept on working. We talked about starting up another daily program of reading and discussing Seth’s ideas. It’s not that we disagree with him, really, or find his material unacceptable. It is that we cannot make it work for us the way we want it to—that is, to evidently supersede deep and powerful inner goals. Probably, also, there are things left unsaid because Jane may unwittingly block them. I told her that Seth had said nothing at all about what I regard as the central conflict: the one between her sinful self, so-called, and her spontaneous self. I even agree that our challenges may well be successfully handled in one or more other probable realities, that in those terms that’s an entirely acceptable way for us to learn. Such a course, however, may leave us with something much less than the solution we want in this reality. And there must be resolutions possible here too, I do believe. Where is our faith? We have much to learn.

“The sessions on the magical approach… can serve as valuable springboards to release from your own creative areas new triggers for inspiration and understanding, and hence for therapeutic development. That should be part of the program, in other words, regardless of what Ruburt intends to do bookwise with those sessions.

(Long pause at 9:03.) “You do not have to worry in an overly strained way about putting the new principles of life into practical experience at once. You do not need to worry or deride yourselves for stupidity if it appears (very long pause, eyes closed), looking over the long annals of work that we have done together, that it should have been obvious that our ideas were leading in certain directions—for not only have I been trying to divest you of official ideas, but to prepare you for the acceptance of a new version of reality: a version that could be described in many fashions. It has been during the annals of history, but many of those fashions also indisputably, and with the best of intentions, managed to give a faulty picture: You ended up with your gods and demons, unwieldy methods and cults, and often with the intellect downgraded. I hope, of course, that our ‘model’ avoids many of those pitfalls.

I have come to feel that I should have encouraged Jane to speak and sing much more often in Sumari, either when we were alone here at the house, or on a Friday night, say, when we had company. I gave up doing so partly because I hesitated to add to her pressure to perform, whether or not the material might be recorded, and partly because, except on rare occasions, she didn’t offer to sing—or to have a session—as she used to spontaneously do in our downtown apartments.

The panspermian theory is that life reached the Earth from a living organization permeating our entire Milky Way galaxy, and that there is a creator, or intelligence, or God out there. In talking with Jane this noon I went the step further by saying that the galaxy itself is alive—not merely full of life. Jane and I discussed various ways that All That Is could have seeded life on earth through the roles of probabilities, and how certain successive forms could take root upon the earth when environmental and psychic conditions were right, and so give the appearance of an evolutionary progression. All That Is, I said, might have offered those same incipient forms to the living earth many times, only to have the earth reject them or fail to develop them for many reasons. But even these latest scientific theories are based upon ideas of a past, present, and future; their proponents do not consider that basically time is simultaneous—that the universe is being created now. We had an interesting discussion. In Chapter 1 of Dreams, see sessions 882 and 883.