“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Other portions of the personality, while recognizing this, still felt that the personality as a whole needed to impose some restraints upon what it regarded as flamboyantly spontaneous qualities. Therefore it chose a highly restrictive early environment. It chose a parent whose emotions were highly unrestrained, so that the parent’s action could serve as a constant reminder of its own flamboyant emotions.

The symptoms had begun however before that time, but lightly. He also felt that you had adopted symptoms earlier, somewhat that as a system of controls—that you were so emotionally upset you didn’t know what to do, and therefore put yourself in a position where you could do little of importance: you could not make errors.

Give us time. He did not count upon the body’s response. He was terrified of the vulnerability to pain, and yet he felt the ability to face and handle the pain was something he would run away from otherwise; that he had done everything to avoid it, and that it was one of life’s physical realities that he had refused to admit. So he felt a taste of it would not hurt him.

He also felt it would help him understand to some extent his mother’s actions, and rid him of the hatred he had of her. Now give us time. The problem as he set it in the framework he made for it, was quite literally huge. He also wanted to understand the effect of mind on matter. He did not really believe, intellectually, what I told him, that you form your own reality, and he felt that the symptoms would also help. He did not get his symptoms to test my theories, understand. Do you follow me?

The matter of speaking the opposite of what he means to say: this always occurs then he makes an innocuous remark that is meant to cover up a repressed feeling. The remarks are again harmless ones, usually a line or two of pointless conversation, chatter meant to cover up a thought that has briefly come into consciousness, and been repressed.

The use of the opposite is simply to tell him that he is not meaning what he says, that the remark, usually a pleasant one, is covering up an unpleasant feeling.

What you have now is a residue in the body of conflict representing mental conflict, when at the same time the muscles are being given signals to let go completely, and also signals to tense, signals of control. They work against themselves then. Give us time. (Pause.)

(This was not what I meant by my remark. I was, rather, briefly considering expense. Actually we did go to Saratoga, on June 28-29, 1969.)

His conscious mind, when he is not writing, should be anchored on something. There is too much unrecognized free brooding, when he sits doing nothing consciously, waiting perhaps for inspiration but not in a positive way. He will know to what periods I am referring, now that I have pointed it out. He should have a painting in progress as a hobby, or several for such times, or do household activities. His mind, his conscious mind, is the type that should be anchored in such a way, for it is overactive, otherwise, and when he is not at his best it will leap to brooding. He lets this go by.

Now. The Saratoga issue is clear. If you drive past his old house he should tell himself that he no longer needs it or what it stands for, that he can retain good memories of it. (Long pause.) It will be very easy for him to think of the town as the place where his grandfather lived, and this will bring about the beneficial aspects. It reassures him however to know that the town is still there, that he is free to go to the town and free to leave it. Symbolically this is important.