“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.

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).

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.

1. Helen Bowman — Miss Bowman, my parents and I always called her — was my art teacher in the Sayre, Pennsylvania, high school from 1935 until my graduation in 1937. Through an arrangement with my mother, Stella Butts, Miss Bowman loaned me the money to attend commercial art school in New York City from 1939 to 1941. I was drafted into the Air Force in 1942, during World War II, and repaid the loan over my three years of service.