“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

SESSION 619, OCTOBER 9, 1972
9:06 P.M. MONDAY

1. In larger terms Seth’s ideas as to what the “whole self” is take in a great deal — with reincarnation and probable personalities, for instance, being only two of the concepts involved. The safest thing to say would be that each session, even, adds to our knowledge of what a constantly expanding whole self can be. See both The Seth Material and Seth Speaks.

3. Here Seth quotes himself exactly from an unscheduled session held on February 26, 1972, during our vacation in Marathon, Florida.

4. In this book there are many examples of various kinds of altered states of consciousness on Jane’s part. In addition to Seth’s volume, these sometimes resulted in very creative products of her “own”: Some of the psychic experiences connected with her book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, which she began in November, 1972, are described in the 639th session in Chapter Ten. And in the 653rd session in Chapter Thirteen, we go into those involved with the writing of her long poem, Dialogues of the Speakers, on April 2, 1973.

So one of the most hampering beliefs of all, as earlier mentioned (in the 614th session in Chapter Two, for instance), is the idea that the clues to current behavior are buried and usually inaccessible. This belief itself closes to you the contents of your own conscious mind and prevents you from looking there for the answers that are available.

(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.

(10:35.) The idea of punishment, the belief in it, also enters in. You do what you decided to do anyway — have the session — but by punishing yourself with your own personal interpretation.

(“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.