“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When no effort is made now and then to encounter strangers, or guests of that nature, in any position of relative authority, then Ruburt does not question his feelings or beliefs directly. The fact is of course that the feelings existed before the physical condition.

With the interview, Saturday’s planned visit, and even with the connection with Eleanor, you both decided to be a bit more open in that regard. The encounter with the reporter, for example, on quite practical levels represented a shot in the arm, in that it quickly showed Ruburt that he is quite able to deal with such situations, that he handles them well, and that sense of confidence can then be used as new information to help break down old beliefs of inferiority.

This does not mean of course that you must helter-skelter have a burst of interviews of visitors—but after three or four encounters with people of any supposed authority, Ruburt is then in a position to make new decisions on such matters, based on current knowledge and his own preferences: and he will no longer avoid such adventures out of fear.

(10:25 PM. This actually represented the end of the session. It was one of the most difficult sessions I ever recorded; I told Jane that by its end I was barely able to write Seth’s words legibly. In spite of the very reasonable tone of the material in it, to me it seemed to fly in the face of all of the accumulated fears that had been bugging me, and Jane also, I thought. As soon as Seth mentioned her feelings of inferiority at the beginning of the session, it was all downhill for me; I thought we’d done a reasonable job on encountering those with our pendulum work, but it seemed that they were still as present and active as ever. Nor could I take any comfort from Seth’s remarks about encountering strangers, or even friends, I said, since it seemed that whenever any outsider was present we were both constantly worrying about whether they would notice Jane’s condition, whether she ever got on her feet, and so forth, until it seemed that those episodes were hardly worthwhile. Jim Poett told us that the Voice will send a photographer up for pictures, so I’d figured we’d spend time worrying about that, too.