“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(While we were in Rochester I mentioned a question to Jane that I thought Seth ought to consider. According to the chronology of events that Jane made up from her old notebooks last year, the symptoms began before the psychic manifestation of her abilities. At the time this knowledge was a surprise to us, since we’d fallen into the habit of thinking the symptoms were an outgrowth of the psychic abilities.

(Once again we sat for the session before 9 PM, and once again it was slow in coming about. Even though Jane told me she felt Seth around at 9 PM. At 9:20, she told me about the “shuddering” feeling she’d experienced in her chest in Rochester, after I had first mentioned the above question to her. Jane said that when I brought up the question again tonight she felt the shuddering return, although it was located farther down her torso, in the stomach area, this time. At 9:25, though, just before the session began, she said the feeling was better.)

He did not tell you the many times he used my suggestions with good results in Rochester, simply because when he had the time to talk to you other matters had arisen, and he forgot some of the instances.

On one occasion he did almost come very close to the feeling of freedom necessary, but all the suggestions need to be followed, not simply the ones he happens to remember at any given time. The suggestions are given in such a way that one makes the other easier to follow. They work as a group therefore also.

Give us a moment. Again, the session to be read daily for a while. It is very important that when he feels caught in a dilemma—to move because he wants something, or not to move because he thinks it will hurt—that he not prolong the dilemma, but move despite his mood at the time.

The whole class knew of the session. He was disappointed in me, also, thinking that I should have been able to save the woman. At the same time he resented being put in the position to begin with. His mother had attempted suicide several times. On a deeply unconscious level he worried that perhaps symbolically he did not want to save the woman—who was, incidentally a mother. He felt responsible for his own mother’s suicide attempts, to some degree, and this added to the situation.

At the same time he was feeling that he would not be a great writer either, you were telling him he was using only about a tenth of his abilities, and so in both areas he was not living up to his expectations or yours, to his way of seeing. There are other old tie-ins here, in that he was always considered very good or very bad, in that people always liked him instantly or disliked him instantly. You could not ignore him. But the contrasts were always stressed in early life, so that if you were not the one you were the other.

He was giving a good deal of time to our sessions. The woman’s session, to him, was to some degree a test of the material’s practical worth to someone in deep trouble. The woman’s death obviously meant that it did not pass. Again, he forgot the integrity of the personality. It must make its own choices, and may accept or refuse help given. The woman did not want the session, and had made a decision she did not intend to change. Venice’s will or anyone else’s could not stand against that.

Some important blockages would therefore come when he tried to tell himself he could do something, such as walk downstairs correctly, when at the same time he did not believe it possible. This was in my suggestions I emphasized the ends rather than the means. It is also why I want the session read so often, assuring him as it does that even in his present physical condition alone he can perform with much better flexibility—

Try to adjust your own attitude as you hope Ruburt will adjust his. Encourage him therefore to follow the session, and assure him that you believe he can follow it. Do not tell him ahead of time that he will not succeed. Do you follow me?

Now. Thoughts have their own energy. Your thoughts and everyone else’s. Your own greater awareness now, with Ruburt, to him represents the first real break in your armor. It will also serve to release feelings of joy that you have inhibited. These feelings are released not only in paintings that you are working on, say, now, but on paintings that were completed earlier. Your emotional reality permeates everything with which you come in contact—across the board, regardless of the time element.

First of all, because you are the eldest, and because of your father’s position, because you were making good money as a young man, Loren braced himself against your situation at that time. You were the one starting out making money. Both of them wanted to beat you at the game, simply because you were the eldest, but as they began you gave it up.

(10:56. After the session I told Jane I thought Seth didn’t finish dealing with the question I’d outlined before the session. As Jane herself had done in discussing it, Seth spent much time exploring the second part of the question, relating to Venice’s friend, while not saying anything about the onset of symptoms before the psychic abilities showed themselves.)