“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Seth said my special sensitivity to windy days during hay fever season, [and one I was well aware of], stemmed from an incident that took place while I was traveling to California with my parents when I was about three years old. [This would be about 1922.] On a windy day on the prairie, somewhere west of the Mississippi, but short of the West Coast, I stood by a hill with my parents. My mother and father were arguing loudly. Father threatened to leave my mother and my brother and me. My father also had hay fever. I had had attacks before, but after this incident I had hay fever each year. [I have always had it since I can consciously remember.] When I remarked that my father had got rid of his hay fever, Seth said he gave it to me. Seth said this is a common occurrence in illnesses being passed about among a family group. I identified with my father out of fear, Seth went on, because he threatened to leave me and thus must be all powerful; and since my father had hay fever, I acquired hay fever as a mistaken sign of strength.

(Bill’s mother, who was also an arthritic cripple like Jane’s mother, was a very aggressive personality, a masculine one, who developed arthritis in order to lose her mobility and thus avoid harming Bill’s father and the children. She felt a growing rage and aggressiveness she could not control. Seth said association worked here, in that Jane could perceive this data because her own mother has arthritis. Bill’s mother was very fond of flowers.

(Bill’s mother was fascinated by the relationships of numbers, Seth said, and the color blue. After the session Bill revealed that his mother had been a bookkeeper, which Jane and I did not know previously. Peggy recalled that Bill’s mother had been buried in a blue dress, which upset Bill’s father very much; and that Bill’s mother had many blue dresses in her wardrobe.

(Seth told Bill he subconsciously blamed his father for his mother’s condition, after Bill remarked that whenever he and his father were together for a few minutes they would end up arguing. Also, when a small child Bill had overheard a sexual encounter between his parents, in which his mother cried out. Bill took it to mean his father had hurt his mother. Later when his mother fell ill, Bill made the subconscious connection with her illness and this earlier incident, and blamed his father for his mother’s illness.

(Seth told Bill that a summer Sunday in 1946 is very important to him subconsciously. It involved Bill’s father William [Jane hadn’t known the name of Bill’s father], and an older man with brown hair whom Bill looked upon as being in a position of authority. There was some kind of disagreement as to Bill’s choice of a career [Bill had left the Navy not long before], an argument with Bill’s father; ever after that Bill didn’t get along with his father. Bill did not follow his father’s suggestions, I believe.

(Seth told Bill that his mother had been very close to another female in the family, though not a daughter. They had talked about childbirth, etc. Bill thinks the other woman was possibly the wife of his father’s brother.

(Bill’s mother exerted a “pull” on his father which the father subconsciously resented. Her illness was not the result of events in this life only, but of past lives also.

(Bill and Peggy agreed that Seth’s material on his parents seems to fit them psychologically, although some of the information given concerning Bill’s subconscious feelings toward his father was a surprise to Bill. At one point Seth asked Bill to not say so much when he answered a question, because this led Ruburt to start to actively and consciously consider the material and to make his own interpretations, which could be distorted. Seth also asked Bill not to tell us any more about his family relationships; presumably so that more material Seth came through with in future sessions could be checked with Bill’s knowledge, as in the blue dress and the bookkeeping incidents.

(Addition: Also, Seth said, when a person gets sick, they want the illness—a reference to my hay fever, taken from my father.