“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane said her eyes were feeling much better, although “full of moisture,” and that the copying work she did on James, following Seth’s suggestions in the last session, went well. Her legs and ankles still felt “itchy,” as described before, and at times she had similar feelings throughout the body. General improvements, then, seemed to be under way.

Suggestions such as I have given you are meaningless if any improvement is faced by an attitude that says “Such a minute improvement is meaningless,” or “This has happened before, and gone nowhere”—and so I wanted those attitudes completely routed out. I also would greatly like the two of you to remember your own considerable natural creativity, innovative ideas, and usual independence of thought (all amused)—those are your assets. They should be applied with the idea of helping Ruburt to improve.

You can be quite happily surprised, not only by your changes of attitude, but by the quickness with which such suggestions are used and utilized.

(Seth’s material earlier this evening, about responsiveness to the world, in whatever form one chose, reminded me of an idea I’d mentioned to Jane last week. I’d dropped it because I became unsure of the reactions on both of our parts. The idea involved our concentration for just five minutes a day—say when we lay down for our naps—on sending out suggestions to the effect that we’d hear from people we wanted to hear from, either/or by letter or in person. Obviously the people would be well-enough known for us to have heard of them. But I’d been thinking that it might be a way to break our habits of retreat. I became concerned, though, about whether our beliefs had changed enough to make such contacts possible, or welcome to us if they did materialize.

You put yourselves in the position, where if you valued your own work, you expect to receive no recognition, and the greater the work, the less recognition. I suggest that you do the exercise you mentioned, dealing however with an excellent increase in sales of the books, for this will help many other people, and you also.

(“Well, sending out suggestions about selling books implies a change of attitude to some extent—”)

(“—so I’m wondering if our doing this will collide with what we’re trying to do about the symptoms. The suggestions about sales won’t increase his feelings of vulnerability, will they, just when we’re trying to build up confidence, and so forth?”)

Your black-and-white beliefs have often led you both to either expect scorn, misunderstanding, or on the other hand to expect too much of others who come here. It is good, however, to suggest that “your definition of important people” read the books, to suggest that the books fall into the proper hands, in those terms.