“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This is our first private session since September 27, 1971. During the long layoff Jane and I worked on Seth’s book, editing, rewriting notes, etc. The book was delivered to Prentice-Hall a week ago today. Jane called the publisher today, and learned that The Seth Material is due in paperback probably in January, with Seth’s own book to be published next October.

(Jane said she was somewhat nervous as we sat waiting for the session tonight. I had some doubts of my own. These were connected, with the sessions per se. I wasn’t sure, really, whether Jane wanted to resume them now, or wait, etc. I finally asked her this afternoon whether she wanted to have a session this evening.

(Jane said she finally became aware of “half-formed words, or something like that,” from Seth, as we waited for the session to begin. I found I had to work harder taking my notes, to remind myself of the many symbols and signs I had worked out; some of these had temporarily slipped my mind, I discovered. Jane’s pace was brisk.)

Now I told you that when the book was finished, you could feel free to have some private sessions if you so desired. You are welcome to them but that is up to you.

(“Yes.” Plus two others that Jane was committed to.)

(I heard a man and a woman begin to climb the stairs from the front entrance of the apartment house. They clumped on up past our floor to the one above, sounding very loud and clumsy. As I feared, they had come to call on the tenant who lived in the small apartment above our living room, where we were holding the session. I heard the door open, then slam shut, and a babble of voices. Footsteps began to resound back and forth overhead. I was of course highly irritated, as I always am at such interruptions during sessions. Jane, in trance, kept speaking though, seemingly not bothered.)

The feeling-tone, somewhat generated in childhood as I told you, was momentarily changed for the better when your relationship with him began. The feeling-tone however was one of the issues that led him to seek so for answers, and also made it very difficult for him to accept them.

The creative liberation in his own work (since Seth’s book has been finished Jane has started two books of her own) is a clear symptom on the positive side of the change in feeling-tone, as was the more expansive idea of adding to your establishment. (Renting the second apartment, across the hall from the original one.)

The feeling-tone can now be encouraged, the optimism and sense of joy and accomplishment, by indulging in those activities in which he is accomplished and takes joy. (Noise upstairs.) For some time your own feeling-tone however was still not over the boundary in your terms to the positive side. For this reason you often reinforced each other’s poor moods, for example.

The feeling-tone of Ruburt’s mentioned earlier in your terms, the negative one, was triggered as you know by his reaction to your illness, which was followed by rising difficulties on the part of your own parents. He felt trapped by them, having to help them, as he felt trapped by his own mother.

When he felt trapped he adopted those symptoms, though to a much lesser degree, that his mother had when she was trapped. His childhood situation filled him with terror, yet there was the impetus of growing up to set him free. This time he found himself in adulthood with no such “escape” in quotes offered or possible in the old terms.

These are obviously not the only issues involved. They were simply trigger points. At the same time he had not found himself yet where he wanted to go with his own career. He never thought of himself beyond the age of 30. In his dreams by then he would be a well-known writer, and that was the glorious end of the tale.

What seemed to be a time of most uncomfortable and unhappy circumstance was indeed a re-evaluation and adjustment, most necessary if the personality were to continue to function as a strongly creative effective individual.

There were then physical side-effects. He was used to dealing with parents as enemies. Your own position as partially in league with those enemies, to his way of thinking, confused him further. His loyalty to you would make him by turns deny any backed-up feelings toward your parents, and then he would be forced to recognize them, and in doing so he would become angry at you for having parents.

It was the religious connection at your father’s funeral that upset him. His reactions were based upon the past and had to be brought up into the present, and worked through, and this largely has been done. Your mother, for example, is quite aware that Ruburt has in his own way grown to cherish her.

He was ready to move the minute your parents got in difficulty, and, was outraged that you did not do so. He is discovering through your own parents that parents are simply people. (Pause.) The charge gradually thus becoming manageable.

It was, however, like a second, more painful adolescence. He felt always on shifting ground, and could not get his footing—hence the rigidity.

(10:02. Jane’s trance had been good. I was finding the session very revealing. Since it dealt with parents, I brought up a thought I’d been entertaining, although I told Jane I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea after all.

On another level she encouraged Ruburt in his own development. As Ruburt knows she was a Christian Scientist and a reader. Both grandmothers, while seeming so different, were more than usually concerned with the nature of the soul, and their idea of what religion was.

In developing his own abilities and searching for answers through these sessions, Ruburt also unconsciously sought, and seeks, finds answers for his mother, since she was unable to find them, and answers for his grandfather Burdo as well. (“Little Daddy,” as Jane called him.)

Ruburt’s father was very bound to his mother. The energy went out of him with her passing. He had no intention of living to a ripe old age. (Del died at 66, very suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage.) He was very uneasy about Ruburt, until Ruburt met you, and he then turned Ruburt over to you.

He wanted to join both Mattie and Dorothy. (Dorothy, Mattie’s sister, died a year or so ago at a very advanced age.) His emotional direction however was always with his mother. He had been a woman, and Mattie a man. Mattie had owned him. For a good deal of this life, while loving her, he depended upon her for handouts, and refused to set himself up independently to point out the old relationship when he was forbidden independence.

This time his dependence was a source of hurt to her.

He did not use his abilities fully to spite her, while loving her. This was the reason for the repressed aggression. He was basically childlike, trusting not people however but nature. They are having a reunion in depth.

(“Okay.” I never met Mattie. I was still writing. When I looked up I saw that Jane was out of trance, her eyes bleary. I said good night to Seth quickly, but I was too late. “It’s me,” Jane said. I also forgot to note the time the session ended. Approximately 11:10.

(Jane said she had to “fight to stay in trance” at the last, because she began to pick up some “bad feelings” about Midge, alone in the house down there in Florida, and probably drinking. Jane kept wanting to come out of trance. She had an impression of Midge in a robe, crawling on the floor near the oil stove in the living room. Jane saw no flames, she said, but “it was all hazy, like smoke... I don’t know, but I don’t feel good about it right now.” Then, “I’ve still got this scary feeling. Maybe I’ve just translated all the mixed-up feelings about my father and the house there and everything into Midge. I’ve got the impression that she was trying to close the door of the stove.”

(Class had been discussing dream realities, personality, etc., for about an hour; Pat and Sheila began talking back and forth on Sheila’s ideas on separate personalities, when Jane interrupted to say that she had the impression that the “hole in the universe” had opened up in Dr. Sam Levine’s house next-door and a crowd of people were flying from it into the room. She added that she thought their teacher was standing at the table by the windows. We went into Alpha to see what we could get—most of us had that impression of other: in the room—and Jane got the words to a chant, which she wrote down. As she started to read this chant to us, she suddenly threw her head back and wailed the words in an extremely loud voice; she then remained in trance for five minutes or so, and began to speak in a liquid, near-whisper:

(The second voice, which came through about twenty minutes later, was louder and sounded “older”: