“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. There are two strong aspects in your personality. One having to do with the reason why you entered the service; a desire for order; a desire for excitement, but excitement within an ordered sequence. There is also, in this same respect, an organizational aspect to your personality that is not now being used to advantage, and therefore can have negative consequences. You like to organize things and people. It is in this regard that you found the presence of your husband distracting when the two of you moved. Do you follow me?

([Mary:] “Yeah. I thought that he would be home and we could...uh... he’d have more time to farm, and we could work something out, but I was really relieved when he went to, had to go to work at night and I could read and study by myself.

You need, first of all, to develop some of your abilities in a purposeful manner. You are not using them. You are playing with them, but not using them as you want to. The organizational part of yourself wants you to organize yourself, and so far you have not done this.

Now. As far as your fears are concerned, in your periods of depression, you feel that you have not used your abilities in a “responsible” way. You feel that therefore, you cannot “pat yourself on the back.” You feel to some extent like a hypocrite because in, I believe, New Jersey, at least before you moved here, you spoke of your writing but you did not work with it in an organized fashion. You did not direct it.

In periods of depression you feel that your life, the main points, have passed, and that you have lost time—important time that you feel you cannot recover. All of these fears work together to cause the present difficulty. Now. There is no one who can change your life for you. But you can change it. And in that lies your hope and your salvation. And so you must begin to do so. You are now organizing your life about your hearing defect. In the main, you are forcing others again to relate to you in that regard. You mention it often. You bring it into the conversation. When I tell you now, “often,” it would not otherwise be noticed, for you also exaggerate the extent of the hearing loss. I did not say there was not a loss. I am saying you are exaggerating the loss that there is.

But you must give yourself some relaxation from the constant concentration upon negative aspects.

If you do not do this, you will not improve even if you have the operation. Now, I am not saying that the operation may not temporarily help. But without changing your attitude, it will not help to any degree that will compensate you. But the decision, you see...

But the decision...

The money was also a symbol of communication as far as both of you were concerned. It was not the money, but your ideas about the money. And clashes that resulted.

Now this does not necessarily refer to me, here. But if you do not care what they think, then, again, you will not listen. Observe yourself—in conversation. I do not mean to watch yourself so closely that you cannot think, but observe your own reactions and your thoughts. Honestly ask yourself in situations: “Do I want to hear? And if I do not, why don’t I?”

Now. Often, you use sound as a barrier. Also, you use monologs, and set up a barrier of sound to protect yourself from other people. And you do not realize that you do this. You erect barriers like walls—so that someone wanting to communicate with you cannot get through, cannot find a “hole” in your conversation to reach you. And the more nervous you are, the more frantically you erect this barrier of sound. You use sound as a barrier, therefore, and when you become doubly threatened, then you do not hear the sounds that come from without, but retreat from them. The entire “gestalt of sound” is therefore highly important to you in your “mechanism of survival”. You have used it to protect yourself, either erecting sound yourself to protect you from communications coming from without, or, when this fails, by refusing—refusing to hear. You must, therefore, ask yourself where this charged attitude toward sound originated, and why you use it in such a way. And I will give you some clues.

Begin to play music that you like. Listen to the rain. Do not “just listen,” but allow yourself to be open to the different pattering sounds and sound patterns that the rain makes. Become fascinated with the behaviors of sound. Tell yourself that sound is like light; that it is easily available.

Now some people do not like to look at unpleasant objects or sights, but very few of them would stop using their vision and give up the good sights so that they would not see bad ones. Yet this is what you are doing in your present course. Give us a moment.

You overeat, to compensate for the other joys that you do not allow yourself. If you began to paint for an hour a day, you would not need to eat so much. When you bring food and drink with you, you do two things. You bring along your own “security blanket”, for one thing. You also show that you are insecure and frightened outside of the home environment, and must bring nourishment from there along with you. Now the joy that you experience when you are painting will be yours, and not desert you whether you stay in your house or go to someone else’s. You will not have to worry about “carting it along” with you. As you probably suspect, the overeating is the one great indulgence that you allow yourself, and even then you surround it with all kinds of taboos. It is not the fact that you overeat, and that you are desperately frightened because you overeat—because of your sister’s history. You do not overeat simply any food, but you surround eating itself with taboos, so that it must be “pure food,” “good food,” to your way of thinking. And there are foods that you will eat and foods that you will not eat, and you project moral implications upon the foods. Some foods are “good,” to your way of thinking, and some foods are “bad.” To you this does not necessarily or alone mean they are good for the body or bad for the body, but in themselves you give them moral characteristics as you would people. So that beneath the whole attitude is the idea: “This is an evil food,” and be shunned as you would shun an evil person, within that framework of thought.

The book that you bought, Psycho-Cybernetics, and the other one—both of these are good for you. But do not simply read them. Use them. Each book approaches various problems from different viewpoints. But together they will be of great help. Since you yourself began these reactions and originated them, you yourself can change them. And you can change them as of this moment.

Imagine for an experiment, now, a world in which there is no sound. Do not imagine that you are deaf. That is not what I am saying. But imagine that the world itself has no sound for anyone to hear. Do you see the difference?

You are imagining a situation in which there is no sound to be heard; whether or not you have ears, there is no sound. Then, imagine that, suddenly, a raindrop falls and makes a first sound... the first sound that can ever be heard. And imagine the impact and the beauty of that sound. Then slowly imagine other sounds appearing in the world, appearing in the same way that a flower might appear, so that sounds begin to be born in the universe. Imagine, then, the joy of hearing that sound in a world that had known none. Whatever sounds, then, that imaginatively come to you, feel the brilliance and miracle of them as they are born out of the silence. And then give thanks for a world of sound, and let yourself revel that you live in this world where sound is a part of your environment and surroundings. In all of this, do not think about your ears, but do the imaginative exercise exactly as I have suggested it. That alone, done once a day, will help arouse again within you the joy and wonder of that particular sense.

Now you used the energy that your classmate (Eleanor) was sending you for other overall purposes. While you did not want to hear, her energy could not force you to hear. Indeed, you would automatically put up a defense, because you considered not hearing to be important to your survival. The exercise that I just suggested to you will, if followed, now, help you open up sufficiently so that energy sent to you can be utilized for that specific difficulty. But while you refused to hear, you would consider energy sent to you particularly to make you hear also a threat to your survival, and would be determined to block it. You must realize that your survival depends upon enjoying all of your senses fully. Reading the session alone should help you realize that.

If you do that, it is fine. But it is not as important as the painting. Doing things for other people is important, but doing things, as our friend (Rob) said, for yourself is imperative.

Now. There is nothing degrading in tears. Think of them, again, now, as being as natural as rain that falls out of the sky when the clouds are full. The rain refreshes the ground and tears can refresh the soul when depressions are freed to follow their natural course. Then, indeed, they flow away in tears and the soul is refreshed. It does not “hold onto its grudges”. When you hold a grudge, you are like some angry, little black cloud that says: I will hold onto this moisture, and I will never let it go!” But clouds have better sense, and so easily they empty their contents and the rain refreshes the land. So can tears refresh the land of your psyche. And used in such a manner depressions fall away naturally and allow, if you will forgive me for a trite phrase, “the sun of joy to shine.” Otherwise, the cloud becomes blacker, and blacker and blacker until the sun cannot be seen, and until the sun, when glimpsed, seems wrong, out of context, and does not appear in such a dark landscape. And so you try to hide it.

Now. The difficulty with the foot...did have a reincarnational setting, originally, as I mentioned. But there was no reason why that had to appear in this life, particularly.

It did originate in a past life, as mentioned, but it did not have to reassert itself, now. It served your purposes, however. And it was also another method of retreat. You did not have to go out into a strange enviroment, away from the home and hearth. Now, it predated the hearing difficulty in its strongest form, but the “habits” were always with you. You always “favored” one foot more than the other, and you built up muscular reaction. When you began to “clear” your foot—when you got the new shoes—your hearing gave you more difficulty. You needed more of a crutch, to make up for the symptom you had lost, simply because you did not understand the reasons behind the difficulties. And without understanding, you can medically rid yourself of one condition, only to make ready certain that you have another one planned to take over! You were finally driven to some kind of desperation, so you accepted the new shoes. You used the symbol. You could have been quite as comfortable without the new shoe, but the symbol was a good one, and you used it and took advantage of it.

But then you became frightened, and that is when the hearing difficulty, then, bothered you so deeply. You will not need to substitute symptoms in such a fashion, as you learn to look into yourself.

Ruburt’s class is good for you. It is good for you both, not only because of the particular group here, and the subject matter, but also because it gives you contact with other people under a different context. It gets you out of your environment. It also brings the two of you together in a common experience.