“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“My side bothers me considerably as I write this, at 8:30 PM. Yet I went for a walk after supper. I’m distinctly uneasy. After napping Thursday afternoon [the 12th] I fell into a deep depression, not speaking to anyone any more than necessary. This obviously involved Jane more than anyone else. My physical hassles have waxed and waned—I’m hoping that paying the taxes tomorrow helps. [They amount to much less than I’d figured on, incidentally—including estimated payments for 1979 —so one would expect me to respond to that—but I haven’t yet.

(“The pendulum insists there’s nothing wrong physically in the side-groin area, but I’m beginning to wonder. Pendulum tells me the side bothers because I’m not working on Mass Reality, which will get us money, whereas Through My Eyes is a less-certain project, would take longer, and the time I spend on it is time lost on Mass Reality. In other words, I’m very concerned about my financial contribution, and paying all those taxes exacerbates it all.

(Then while doing the dishes before this evening’s session, Jane said she “got” that Friday night was the “playout” of my dreams involving Bill Gallagher and Sue, which had taken place separately. The playout wasn’t literal, Jane said, “So I don’t think most people would have made the connections. But I picked up that Seth would go into those dreams tonight, and I asked that he give the best information that he could.”

(“After supper tonight I told Jane that I felt as though I was “near a breaking point,” that I might have to seek medical help. For what I wasn’t sure—a hernia, something wrong in my side, stomach, or what. She was upset. We’d slept this afternoon from 2:30 until 6. I’d hoped I would feel better with the rest, which I seemed to crave, but it hadn’t helped. Nor had paying the taxes this morning, although it could take the body a while to respond to any change in status or thinking, and I’d seen this happen before.

(I read my paper quoted just above to Jane as we sat for the session. I asked that Seth comment, but also said I didn’t want him devoting the whole session to my challenges, since I know Jane wants book material also.)

In the dream (of March 29) Bill Gallagher offers to take you out to dinner, and you say you have good food at home. Here the word “food” refers to nourishment. He offers the nourishment of the world—but the world as he perceives it, and instead you prefer your private nourishment. Bill Gallagher sees a dog-eat-dog world, and, as mentioned earlier, animals have an entirely different meaning to Bill.

It refers not only to the matters that I have mentioned in past sessions, but also to your ideas of age, and those are also connected to your ideas of manliness, for you want to be a provider.

If you were just a writer or just an artist, or if Ruburt were just a writer or just a psychic, then neither of you would be involved in this endeavor, which is even in your terms, of such a creative nature that it defies definitions. It does not rest in either of you alone, but rises from joint psychological structures (intently) that you have formed together, each using what characteristics you could—psychological structures that you then can use to gain a viewpoint upon reality that is so unique.

Those doubts, however, of course mitigate strongly against your feelings of self-approval, and undermine your natural stamina and courage. Ruburt was bothered by the same feelings in reverse in the past, but he has learned to understand quite clearly that our work is a threefold venture. It would not exist in its present form—and its present form is its best form—were it not for your own participation. In a fashion you are merging arts together, and laying the groundwork for new kinds of art that presently do not exist.

(10:23. We talked about the dream involved with tonight’s session material. I wondered if it was legitimate to say that the group of dreams was a precognitive insight into the one event—the Friday night gathering. Jane thought so. If true, it would be an original insight, I said. Not that the dreams presaged Friday night’s event per se, but pointed toward some sort of event like it taking place. I told Jane that I didn’t remember reading any ideas like this anywhere.

Ruburt used to feel embarrassed because he made more money in those terms than you, and certainly this played some role initially in the symptoms. (Does it still?) You could not have a job, obviously. You had to take care of him, and it seemed you both saved face; but almost all of your problems come from the unthinking acceptance of conventional ideas that have been allowed to hold sway.

The discomfort in the testicle reflects the problem you feel with the masculine role. But the typical masculine role in your country, you must understand, is certainly not primarily that of an artist. If the male has natural abilities that happen to fall among those largely accepted by society, then there is little problem—in that regard at least—but if his natural abilities lie in other directions, then difficulties can arise.

You did what you wanted to do, in line with your own natural inclinations, and only when you judge your circumstances against convention’s surface beliefs do you lack your own approval. You cannot rate the subjective growth of a personality, lines of comprehension, or the value of ideas given to the world. You are a success in lines that can be felt by the world but not measured. The books are more effective than any letter to a congressman, and you put the substance of your life into your notes.

(Seth’s reference to a letter to a congressman came about, I think, because during our conversation on Friday night Bill Gallagher said that no one present had done anything to protest the conditions in our world that we didn’t like—forgetting, of course, that the books themselves are full of protests, and of suggestions for the better. But Bill doesn’t read the books, and to that extent lives in a world closed off from such ideas.)

(10:47.) The tax man is a well-meaning individual, far from a rogue, with his own problems, and in the dream this information is realized by you, and hence picked up by Nebene. Joyce, by his very characteristics, in his way stood for the confused but well-meaning-enough society. Ruburt felt he had paid his dues, physically speaking, and was done with that.

His body is definitely improving, but you must both examine your beliefs again about the conventional matters I have spoken about this evening, for they affect your behavior. You need to free yourselves in your work, allow for regular hours, but as I have often told you, arrange for changes of your own choosing—ordered change is excellent. You lack the give-and-take with others that jobs provide. You need solitude. Yet you must also provide for changes within that routine, for those changes give you a different view of your own subjective reality. And they can often help you solve problems, simply because old associations are broken up.