“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As soon as she saw that I couldn’t take notes. Jane began describing to me what she’d started to pick up from Seth about my condition. I was both very interested and so far out in my own world of sensation that I could hardly comment. I was taking a “body vacation,” she told me. She said much more, which she wrote about briefly Tuesday afternoon at my request. Her notes are inserted at the end of my notes. Seth, Jane said, would explain the whole thing in the next session, whenever that would be held.

(When I finally tried to get on my feet to get Jane more milk, however, I realized that my situation was far from over. I staggered around in the kitchen, taking six-inch steps with more than a little effort and caution. My knees felt loose as could be, but the muscles in the legs were heavy and stolid. I poured more milk for both of us, and ate the cornbread, half asleep as I did these things. When we decided to retire I shuffled about the house, cleaning up and locking doors and windows as Jane made ready for bed. I could have cheerfully collapsed at any time. I bumped into walls and door-jambs, or leaned on tables for support for minutes at a time. I yawned deeply and wished only for bed, over and over again.

(When finally I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, I was more than a little disoriented—for a face confronted me that I hardly recognized. It was almost that of a stranger. I finally figured out why that mirror image confronted me with such an unreal quality: All the muscles and planes of my face were super-relaxed and smoothed out, so that the face at once looked both younger and older than its real age. My jaw hung. In the bedroom, I muttered to Jane that I hadn’t recognized myself.

You wanted to illuminate the world in some respect. You saw your family as a small sample of the world’s peoples, and their interrelationships with each other, and with the neighborhood, as representative of most people’s relationship with the world. You were sorry for your parents. You yearned to help both of them, as you yearned to help your brothers. That part of you existed quite intimately in your thoughts, while at the same time you found it difficult to communicate with the family [members] generally, and you were struck by the great gap of communication that seemingly existed between the most related people.

You sensed certain characteristics in Ruburt when first you met, and you knew intuitively that certain probabilities could bring the two of you together, both using your individual abilities in ways at that time unknown to you, but that those individual abilities, joined, could together produce a new kind of threshold—an overview through which that sensed excellence could at least be glimpsed, contained in essence at least, and communicated.

Now: Ruburt’s rendition of my absentee session last evening was basically correct. When you believe that relaxation means that you are limp, that you can do nothing, that you have let go (with humor), then, of course, you experience it as such. Your body was activated so that it was naturally sedated. To both of you, however, relaxation means somehow to be lax, to shuffle (louder) rather than to be resolute and determined and forever at it; and so then natural relaxation can seem overwhelming, for you are afraid, both of you, that if you relax you will do nothing.