“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Can you hear me?

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?

(During break—I think this break—I told Jane and Rob of when I was very young—ten or eleven. My bedroom window was only about 15 feet away from my parents’ apt. house. The scandal at the time was the noisy and violent arguments of an Italian couple, Anna and Jimmy. If Anna didn`t boil Jimmy’s eggs just right, he’d curse her out, and she’d retaliate by throwing some of Mom’s dishes at him, both of them screaming. All thru my life I’ve thought “nice, civilized people” didn’t raise their voices, get angry enough so that it showed, or display any kind of outbursts. Jim, I believe, feels the same way [or did]. The very few times early in our marriage when I would lose my temper, he would absolutely infuriate me by saying softly, with a smirk, “Temper, temper!” and so I would clam up.)

In this is this life material. You are in the habit of shutting out sound. Now, you can even catch yourself if you are alert enough doing this by the feeling that you have. In a conversation—now listen to me—In a conversation that you now decide sounds boring when you enter it, you can catch yourself thinking: “This is boring. I will not bother to listen. It is too much trouble.” Now you think those thoughts come to you because it is so difficult for you to hear. Instead, those thoughts were yours long before the disability showed itself. You thought that way first, before the condition, And whenever unpleasantness arose, you would make a series of decisions to shut out the sound until these decisions, one upon the other, finally “conditioned” you; you conditioned yourself not to hear. The problem is that after awhile, you see, you conditioned yourself so well that you no longer control the process that you began. And only then do you become frightened.

([Mary:] “Do you think that the condition has changed for the better in say, the last couple of weeks, when my husband and I agreed, for instance, on the check-writing thing; not to write checks for cash and then... so that we could control the money.... I think this will help me to....)

Now, listen. You are not “hearing me out”. As you behave with me, you behave with your husband and. others. You are not listening to me so much as thinking of your next question and what you want to say.

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. 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.

(Long Pause.) I think that you can. The delay, in any case, will not hurt you, in that particular area. And without changing your attitude, the operation will not help. Do you follow me?