“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I regard the first one of the four sessions Jane held before starting Chapter 12 as being a key session, an excellent one indeed for us. We feel that it marks a turning point—yet, paradoxically, we’re not at all sure that we can turn in the right direction! Jane came through with the session just a week after giving the last session for Chapter 11 [on November 24, 1981], and I’m presenting it here in Note 1.

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:

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 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.”

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.

“Another point: Regardless of any seeming contradictions, the beneficial aspects of any particular creative activity far outweigh any disadvantages. The nature of creativity, regardless of any given specific manifestation, is reflected in an overall generalized fashion that automatically increases the quality of life, and such benefits are definite regardless of what other conditions also become apparent. I mean to make clear here that regardless of any complications that may seem only too apparent to you, in the production and distribution of my last book, and Ruburt’s (Mass Events), the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages.

“The ‘proper’ question to ask is not: ‘Can I enter that land?’ The land is here, where you are, and it always has been. The methods, the ways, the beliefs, the modes of travel to a destination create the destination itself. (A one-minute pause.) It is impossible for you to operate without beliefs in your present mode of existence (another minute), ‘for beyond’ those glittering packages of beliefs, however, there exists the vast reservoir of sensation itself, the land that does indeed exist ‘beyond beliefs.’

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.