“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 10 PM I asked Jane if she felt like having a session. We’d been visited today by Loren, Betts and Doug, and Dick, Ida and David, and at times my left groin area had bothered me considerably. Now after everyone had gone—Dick and family stayed until about 8 PM—I felt poorly indeed. As I had last spring, I didn’t know whether my symptoms of unease were physical or mental, and was very concerned. I thought of a hernia—and Loren had been operated on for a hernia this summer—yet I suspected the unease was basically mental. This had been the case last spring. And now, those feelings had returned. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the proper adjective to describe the groin sensations; they weren’t ones of pain—but what?

It is as ridiculous to prove your worth by working in a conventional sense as it is to prove your worth by not working in a conventional sense. Americans have had a fine and often understandable disdain for what was thought of as the European gentleman, or even the literary gentleman, or the man who somehow or other did not have to “rub elbows with the masses.”

You have, again and again (with amusement) an unconventional mind, unconventional abilities—abilities that straddle several fields of endeavor. You have an unconventional wife. Because you have both utilized your abilities and tried to bring some release to that postcard world, your works have automatically resulted in a comfortable living. Your endeavors cannot be labeled, nor can your (to me) contribution to our joint work be assessed. There is no one who can tell you how many dollars per hour you receive for your work, or what value it has.

The man of letters is not understood either, and you feel that your brothers cannot understand what you do, since their minds seem relatively closed —relatively closed—to the books themselves, which would automatically offer an explanation.

You want to show some tangible means of support, however, in that same literal fashion, to your brothers, since you feel they cannot understand what (underlined) you do.

When your art was commercial you could say, again, you were working. When you paint, you feel you cannot justify your art, and in our books you wonder what percentage your notes and contributions might make in the overall royalties, say.

You can use such situations, again, as springboards. In a large measure, those beliefs represent the evidence of the old world before it is set upon by the light of new creativity. Bounce against that world, into the more creative realm that you know in your heart is a far truer representation of reality,

(12:31 PM. Something had really turned Jane on after all. Seth was still around, she told me. “But now what I’ll have is a little milk, a cookie, and a cigarette—and go to bed,” she laughed. Her energy was still up. Even sitting in bed, she remarked that she was picking up more of that generalized material from Seth.

(“I started to get some material from Seth right after breakfast. I felt as if it were being gently inserted into my mind and that for some reason I became aware of it. It’s as if this often happens, material being inserted and then “stacked up” or stored there for, say, the next session. For a few minutes, five or more, I was aware of quite a bit of material on work, and the Protestant mainstream [as separate from, say, Emerson or James or Thoreau, even]. Thought I’d write it down and told Rob some of it. Now though, I just remember the subject matter more or less; now I’m not even sure of that [and it’s only about ten minutes after I told Rob what I’d picked up].

(“Twenty minutes later I’m sitting at the front living room table, feeling relaxy and good about things, when I catch an odd brief but lovely experience; something happened momentarily; I felt as if I was seeing with all of me, instead of just with my eyes.... as if my molecules almost saw what I saw too in their own fashion. Physically my vision was the same, I think.... but there was a fuller visual appreciation or fullness difficult to verbalize....”

(One final note: At the beginning of this session I wrote that I had trouble describing the very uncomfortable sensation in my left groin—that it wasn’t pain. but what? I felt much better by the end of the session; remarkably so, so Seth’s material was on the mark. Then in the bathroom it came to me as we prepared to retire: the feeling in the groin was like a knot—and my realization had been triggered by Seth’s remark about tension I had created in that area. In a flash the understanding led me to a very obvious conclusion that, it seems I should have reached on my own earlier: the knotty feeling was very much like the muscle spasms I’d experienced in the back, years ago when we’d lived on West Water St. These had been so bad that I’d lost months of work; the sessions had begun as Jane tried to help me, as well as for her own needs, in 1963.