“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last night April 23, Monday, Rob suddenly got super-relaxed and really floppy before our scheduled Seth session. In the meantime though as I went into the john, I started to pick up some of the things Seth was going to discuss, and after Rob began his odd relaxation, I got more. As best as I could I told Rob what I was getting. We decided not to have the session—I don’t think Rob could have taken notes anyhow; besides I wanted him to take advantage of what was happening.

(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....”

(I insisted I could take notes okay, even as the feeling deepened. The malaise became more profound. I didn’t feel like writing the notes I wanted to about what was happening. Indeed, I didn’t even feel like taking the cap off the pen. The sensations were extremely pleasant—and heavy, yet looser and looser. My eyes closed. I sat motionless for minutes at a time, bathing in a most beneficial, relaxed state. It was actually one I’d been trying to approximate ever since I’d begun to feel bad after finishing checking all the page proofs for the books we have coming out this year. But when I’d told myself I wanted to relax, I’d had no idea such a profound state could be obtained. I had approached it in a casual way through self-hypnosis: the same lax, heavy looseness in the limbs when I made the effort to move. I savored the experience now because I felt at a deep peace and my body was almost free of aches and pains. But at the same time I wanted to know more.

(Soon I didn’t care, though. My condition became so totally relaxed that any conscious and deliberate movement was forgotten unless I made a strong effort to exert myself—to pick up a piece of paper, to lay this notebook on the coffee table, say. Fortunately I’d put the cats in the cellar before the session so I wouldn’t have to do it later. Jane was obviously concerned. “Are you all right?” she kept asking, and I hardly replied. This was easily the most complete experience of its kind I’d ever known, and it was deepening.

(Jane sat on the couch in her usual place to my left. By now I was far out of it: I doubt if I could have moved except in the direst emergency. As Jane talked I fell asleep a number of times. She said I snored so loudly that she had to turn the TV volume up in order to hear the programs. During half-waking periods I was conscious of my lower jaw continually dropping, so that I sat with my mouth gaping open in a most uncharacteristic manner. I slept through deep, immensely enjoyable and totally saturating periods of relaxation. After a while my arms began to twitch and jump spasmodically without my conscious volition. These reflexive reactions continued for some time, even later in the evening when I began to come out of the heavy sleep periods. But while they were happening I cared not at all.

(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....

(I slept at once. although Jane lay awake until about 2 AM. I felt many reminders and remnants of the experience throughout the next day—Tuesday—especially in the arms and legs: They were often loose and floppy, with a peculiar lightness and ease of motion in the joints particularly. At my request Jane wrote her account of the non-session events of last night, and it’s attached. I noticed more signs of the same sort of relaxation before tonight’s session was due, and wondered if I could focus upon Seth clearly enough, or write fast enough. After a number of hesitations, which only confused Jane as to what I really wanted to do, I sat for the session.

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.

At a certain point your body does not care. It relaxes you anyway. Now Ruburt has much slighter versions, in which, say, daily or weekly tensions no longer collect as they did, which allows him some physical improvement—but he also feels that if he really relaxed he would only do the dishes or whatever. The world would hardly fall in if neither of you did anything for several days. The relaxed body, however, the truly relaxed body, can physically perform of course far better than the tense one.

(Jane said more. She was so emphatic and serious that I had to laugh, though in a subdued way, for I still felt lingering effects from my deep relaxation of last night. I was, for instance, a bit slow writing these notes—yet, oddly, I’d been able to keep up with Seth all right during the session itself.