“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane has grown increasingly restless over the breaks in her activities that are caused by the rest periods she’s taking several times daily. At the same time her back, for example, has improved considerably. She was angry as we sat for the session. “I’m so mad I can’t talk about it,” she said — while talking about it for some 20 minutes. I told her I knew she didn’t want to take the rest periods, and that I had little to offer as an alternative, beyond her simply cutting down on them. I figured she’d be altering her schedule. “Boy, Seth, you’d better bail me out,” she said vehemently. “I can’t have a session on it because I’m too involved — you have to calm down before you can do that. …”

(I did say that her walking was the key to recovery: The more she walked, the less the pressure in any consistent way on other parts of her anatomy. Yet I couldn’t equate the few moments she spent walking with the half-hour rest periods, either.

Our friend is now feeling somewhat more ambitious of late. A few weeks ago, he could hardly wait to lie down at the appointed times, like it otherwise or no, simply because he was so uncomfortable.

You do not project as many negative ideas upon the evening hours, and the same applies to most people to varying degrees. That is at least one of the reasons why these sessions have been held in the evening, where it was at least not as likely that you would try to invest them with the workaday kind of world values.

(Long pause.) You have settled upon a system that seems to be naturally based, the exclusive results of your historic past, one in which your main activities are daytime ones. It seems only natural that early man, for example, carried on all of his main activities in the day, hiding after dark. (Pause.) As a matter of fact, however, early man was a natural night dweller, and early developed the uses of fire for illumination, carrying on many activities after dark, when many natural predators slept. He also hunted very well in the dark, cleverly using all of his senses with high accuracy — the result of learning processes that are now quite lost.

(10:00.) In any case, man was not by any means exclusively a daytime creature, and fires within caves extended activities far into the night. It was agriculture that turned him more into a daytime rhythm, and for some time many beliefs lingered that resulted from earlier nighttime agricultural practices.

This meant, of course, a language (pause) that was in its way more precise than your own, for concepts were routinely expressed that described the vast complexity of subjective as well as objective events. (Pause.) There were myriad relationships, for example, impossible now to describe, between a person and his or her dream selves, and between the dream selves of all the members of the tribe. Particularly in warmer climates, man was naturally nocturnal, and did a good deal of his sleeping and dreaming in the daytime.

(“I was just going to ask you about that.”)

(“No, that was it, about the fill-in session.”)

(10:25 P.M. Jane had no idea “… what he was going to say, or anything.” And note that she did manage to have a session tonight about her own challenges, even though she was quite upset because of them at the same time. Her delivery had, in fact, often been fast and forceful.