“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The first portion of these notes—as indicated—was written after supper on Monday night, preparatory to what I thought would be the regularly scheduled session for the evening. However, the session wasn’t held. Let me explain.

(In the last three days I’ve learned a number of interesting things about my continuing physical upsets—and will list some of my pendulum material should any portion of this session refer to them. The deleted session for April 18 has helped a great deal. My own insights through the pendulum tell me, for example, why Seth in that last private session said I have a “nervous stomach,” but nothing about the other hassles like, say, the side or groin. [It all seems to stem from the initial stomach difficulty.] I need to study more. I still don’t want to burden Jane with a series of sessions on my own problems. I know I can—and am—working them out. Each bit of information is bound to help.

(Not long after finishing Monday’s notes, then, we sat for the session. I didn’t feel too well. Within a few minutes, however, I noticed that I was becoming quite relaxed. I sat with this notebook on my lap but didn’t exert myself to open it. My arms and legs, and head and neck, began to feel looser and looser. “It looks like I picked up a suggestion about relaxation,” I told Jane. “But I’ll be okay. I want to have the session,” I said in answer to her questions. She sat opposite me, smoking, waiting to go into trance. My head flopped back against the couch. “Wow....”

(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 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.

(My state persisted—so much so that I felt like a long-distance runner nearing the finish line. I was engaged in a contest to see if I could help Jane get ready for bed, set the alarm and the electric blanket, turn out the bedroom lights and open the curtains and a window—all before I gave out in a heap on the bed. Indeed, I lost my balance twice while helping Jane undress, and each time collapsed on the bed beside her, to her evident concern. Nor were those episodes painless, for in one of them I put an unnatural strain on the deltoid muscle in my right shoulder. [I’d injured the shoulder last summer while pulling on the starting cord for the lawn mower; it’s bothered me ever since, although not steadily.] The pain was intense, although not as bad when I’d first hurt the muscle. I struggled to rouse myself enough so I could take pressure off the arm; I was afraid I’d re-injured it. So even in that state of deep relaxation, in which I could move only with effort and concentration, I learned something that I fully realized at the time: Even though I was far out on a “trip” of some sort, I could still feel pain. My muscles weren’t magically healing themselves, nor was I undergoing any kind of overall healing that might confound my own beliefs, or those of medical science. Not that I’d thought I was....

(But nevertheless, I knew I was having a most beneficial experience, and one that might very well head off other, deeper troubles. This I understood quite clearly. I believed Jane-Seth’s material about my being on a “body vacation.” It was impossible for me not to believe it, considering that I’d felt so poorly since early in the month, and that I was so much better right now. I just hoped more beneficial results would flow from the experience, and I was appalled that I’d been that badly off, that “tight,” so that my body greatly needed such a drastic kind of relief.

(10:09 PM. “Before the session.” Jane said, “I told Seth I wanted whatever was necessary to help you. I didn’t care what it was. I’d stay out of the way as much as possible. If you were sick of me, or wanted out—anything—I just wanted to know so you’d get better. I know you love me, but maybe you get sick of my running your life or something like that....”