“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 8:30 this evening I finished typing Monday’s short session [for the 8th]. I’d forgotten to do it last night, so absorbed was I in working on the copy-edited Mass Events. Then I made a surprising discovery as I put the session in private notebook number 23 — for there I found my original shorthand notes for the September 3 session. I’d also forgotten to type that one, and for the same reason, evidently. I believe that’s the first time in well over a thousand sessions that I’ve forgotten to type one. I’ve deliberately let a few go for a while because I was busy on other things, but haven’t simply forgotten any. Jane missed the September 3 session, but when she asked me about it a few days ago I replied that I was up to date. I remember wondering why she asked. …

(Once again Jane was very relaxed as we prepared for the session. “I could go to bed right now,” she said, “but it’s too early — I’d be getting up all night. Right now I don’t feel Seth around, though, but we’ll see … My spine’s got all kinds of feelings in it that I’m not used to, but they’re good ones. How does Seth sit? I’m not sitting too well. I felt just great in bed this afternoon. There’s a real fluid feeling there and in my back. But I feel him around now. …” She sipped wine while I worked on these notes.

You might combat those beliefs, struggle against them, but they still carried great weight. You still believed them to an important degree. The entire idea, or fear, that Ruburt had at one time of leading other people down the garden path, was based upon those old beliefs. Those ideas have vanished. You are approaching a state of mind, individually and jointly, that represents far more closely one that is natural, with which the natural person is innately equipped.

Education in your culture is a mixed bag (with ironic and humorous emphasis) — and education comes not from schools alone, but from newspapers and television, magazines and books, from art and from culture’s own feedback. Generally speaking, for the purposes of this discussion, there are two kinds of education — one focused toward teaching the child to deal with the natural world, and one focused toward teaching the child how to deal with the cultural world. Obviously, these are usually combined. It is impossible to separate them.

Your educational systems, however, for all of their idealism, have largely ended up (pause) smothering the natural individual bents and leanings of children, and overemphasized instead the cultural organization. It became more important, then, for the child to conform to the culture rather than to follow its own individual natural leanings. Its own characteristic ways of dealing with nature were frowned upon, so that education does not work with the child’s abilities, but against them. Education then often goes against the grain of the natural person.

The sessions brought about, however, a new kind of education that often seemed in direct conflict with the old, and with the official views of contemporary society. It was of course necessary for you to test them out. Ruburt felt himself more responsible than you, since he spoke the words for me. A private search was one thing — but one publicly followed was something else (intently).

Whether or not the sessions happened as they did, however, once the two of you met, the probability brought about by your relationship meant that in one way or another you would seek out a larger context of consciousness — a context, because of your talents, that would not remain private, but attract others (intently).

(9:23.) The natural person is to be found, now, not in the past or in the present, but beneath layers and layers of official beliefs, so you are dealing with an archeology of beliefs to find the person who creates beliefs to begin with. As I have said often, evidence of clairvoyance, telepathy, or whatever, are not eccentric, isolated instances occurring in man’s experience, but are representative of natural patterns of everyday behavior that become invisible in your world because of the official picture of behavior and reality.

The body’s natural healing processes each day rid people of diseases, repair emotional or bodily illnesses — and such instances go largely unrecorded. Ruburt accepted the magic of a poem, but not the magic of health or mobility, because he was convinced that mobility stood in the way of his other abilities.

He was also convinced — as you were — that you both needed protection from the world. Many of the ideas I have given you lately were indeed in Mass Events (as Jane remarked today), but they have become alive now. In the same way, many other concepts and ideas already given will also assume a new significance and meaning, and add to the richness of your experience, because you will be open to them more than you were before — Ruburt in particular — to ideas having to do with reincarnation, life after death, other spheres of activity.

(9:37 P.M. “I didn’t think I could do it,” Jane said, “but when he came around I knew I could.” I told her the little session was excellent.

(I also told her something I’d thought about this afternoon, and had a bit of trouble expressing now. But these sessions, dealing with Jane’s improvements, validate the Seth material as it’s come to us over the years. This has a drawback, of course, in that we have no official evidence of her “symptoms” on the medical record. However, we do have the testimony of many who know us, plus years of sessions on record, plus our own memories. [Others, I’ve often speculated, couldn’t realize the depth of Jane’s challenges.] As we talked, Jane laughed and said she picked up from Seth that “the best books are yet to come.”)