“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.

(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....

First of all, a note of history: the material Ruburt got on you on his own was excellent, though unfinished. You looked at the world and saw that it was wanting. You yearned to give it some standards of excellence – standards, however, that could be applied to the entire area of living, to personal relationships, to politics, to social events, to philosophical thought.

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.

Thoughts of the will and your approaching 50th and 60th birthdays have led you, Joseph, to look over you life, to ask, “What have I done? Am I a success or a failure?” But when you do so, you often ask the question through the cast of old conventional beliefs. If you ask “Is the world a better place to live because I live?” or “Have I helped the people in the world in any way?” or “Have I lifted men’s hearts or minds in any way?” or “Have I affected others for the better?” then those answers must be yes, and there is no better measure of true success.