“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The brain channels the information that the mind receives to your physical structure, so that your experience is physically sifted and automatically translated into terms that the organism can understand. (Seth-Jane spoke emphatically, rapping upon the coffee table between us.) Because of this, physically speaking and in life as you think of it, the mind is to a large extent dependent upon the brain’s growth and activity. There is some information necessary to physical survival that must be taught and handed down from parent to child. There are basic assumptions of a general nature with which you are born, but because the specific conditions of your environment are so various, these must be implemented. So it is necessary that the child accept beliefs from its parents.

(10:01. Jane said she had been really out during her trance, and that now she felt “almost drunk with exhilaration.” The times noted as she delivered the material show that she’d marched along at a good pace. “On the one hand,” she continued, looking a little bleary, “I could go way under and deliver the book until morning; or I could just go to bed and conk right out.” She was quite curious about the reasons behind these feelings.

(I now described an effect that had started to bother me after the session had begun; it’s a good little example of the way beliefs can work. No sooner had Seth come through than I became aware of an unaccustomed tightness in my writing hand — a tension that interfered with the automatic formation of the letters and words. I kept the notes going by making an extra effort, but I found it quite distracting to keep thinking about the mechanics of writing while trying to concentrate upon what Seth was saying. The difficulty persisted through the delivery and into break.

(I told Jane I’d thought of using the pendulum after the session to get at the cause of the hand phenomenon, since I didn’t want to interrupt book dictation by asking Seth about it. [Briefly for those who have asked me: The pendulum is a very old method. I use it, with excellent results, to obtain ideomotor — “subconscious” — responses about knowledge that lies just outside my usual consciousness. I hold a small heavy object suspended by a thread so that it’s free to move. By mentally asking questions, I obtain “yes” or “no” answers according to whether the pendulum swings back and forth, or from side to side.]

These beliefs working together, then, bring about a strain in the hand that does the writing. Quite simply, you want to express through the sessions these ideas in which you so believe, and yet you feel or believe yourself guilty for doing so when you cannot describe the same ideas to your own parent.

The conflicting beliefs, then, cause the difficulty in the method. The hand’s motion is not as automatically smooth as it should be. You also believe that you communicate through writing far better than you do verbally. To Ruburt you often write notes, saying things easily and beautifully that you find difficult verbally because of your belief.

Your mother’s “condition,” you believe, involves a lack of communication. Your brother told you about her occasionally faltering speech. Now your quite conscious interpretation of an apt kind of self-punishment was a lack of hand motion. I am trying to put this simply so you can follow the connections.

Because you believe your method of expression is primarily through your hand in painting, and you believe your mother’s to be vocal, you tampered with your hand’s motion — not, for example, your speech. Can you follow that consciously?

(10:55. After Jane had come out of another “far-out trance,” as she put it, I was very pleased to tell her that my writing hand was much improved and that Seth had answered her own questions. I went over the delivery with her. Resume at 11:08.)

(“Thank you.” End at 11:33 p.m. Once the session was over Jane began to yawn repeatedly, her eyes wet. My writing hand was practically free of tension now.