“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Before supper this evening Jane said she was tired of “trying to figure out the world,” and so forth. Part of her pique stemmed from her difficulty in trying to get into her ideas on heroics. She has done some excellent writing on heroic themes in recent days, but hasn’t plunged into her library yet. And to me: “Sometimes I think that you, whenever you get any idea that doesn’t have to do with painting, ought to stamp it out with both feet, and just stick to that. You shouldn’t ever have left it....” I admitted that the thought had occurred to me—that indeed I’d been thinking about it a lot since I’d had my physical hassles starting early last month.

(Today we received from Larry Dowler of the Yale archives a letter giving us his latest thoughts, as well as a form to sign. making the gift of papers to Yale legal, evidently. We have a number of questions to resolve first, though. At the moment I must be putting them off, but eventually we’ll deal with them all. We haven’t received our will from Bill Danaher yet, and we have more questions for him, also. I told Jane that I regretted starting that whole business, but she responded by saying that we’d have to do it sometime, probably, so we might as well go through with it. I’m somewhat dismayed by the work that might be entailed – that is, if I carry through with the original idea of checking through all the material, putting it into notebooks that match the originals, and so forth.

It is not surprising then that you often feel insecure. The self can (underlined) be relied upon. That is the main message that you must get through your heads. Impulses are inner messages toward actions that are life-giving. When they appear otherwise, it is the result of habits and beliefs. Through all of history, one way or another, you have believed in the line of culture leading to your own—that impulses were disruptive, suspicious, and not to be trusted; ignoring the child’s impulse to speak, and to walk and grow, to communicate. Those are the ideas you are combating—not simply Freudian or Darwinian concepts from your lifetimes, but the accumulated misinformation from that historic past. So tell Ruburt not to be so impatient with himself, to remind himself that he can indeed trust the self that he knows, regardless of what he had been taught to believe.

I made recommendations, but they seem to take too much effort to follow (quietly ironic) as far as Ruburt is concerned. You have done well there, for the yard work is helping, and the change will naturally bring your creativity to flower if you leave yourself alone. But a change of hours now and then is excellent, as far as Ruburt is concerned in particular. The changes stand for mental flexibility.

You may do as you wish about Yale. It matters little where the papers are kept; and the very academic characteristics that invisibly but definitely add their aura to Yale’s hallowed halls also means that the papers will be treated fairly, conservatively, and without any evangelical air.

(Louder, and in answer to our talk earlier:) I am quite willing to hold as many sessions a week as suits your fancies. A point: I told you that the sessions must be fun—that is, creative, exploratory, and as free as possible – and, I add, not only for you but for me as well. I would not be here if I did not most of the time find it thoroughly enjoyable. There are moments when I wish I could jar you both enough so that you could perceive clearly the intimate, immediate and also far-reaching effect of your beliefs upon your lives. When I wish I could somehow make you understand that reality springs from your thoughts, and not the other way around, and that any given thought is far more real in basic terms than the table upon which Ruburt rests his foot (stamping upon the table with that foot). End of session. A fond and exuberant good evening.