“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday marked the beginning of Jane’s third week home from the hospital, and lately I’ve been trying to gently encourage her to begin a series of private sessions in an effort to learn what we can about the whole hospital-health-establishment belief system, and our part in it through and with the Seth material. I was eager to get Jane started on a program of self-therapy through the Seth material in order to help her counter—or at least supplement—the standard rigid medical framework we’ve been encountering for the last month, or since she went into the hospital on February 26, 1982. [She was discharged on March 28.]

(Pause at 9:10.) To such a degree, of course, the affair was, then, therapeutic. (Pause.) Ruburt is now far more willing to make certain changes in his life than he was earlier, and he sees himself more as one of a living congregation of creatures—less isolated than before, stripped down from the superperfect model, and therefore no more under the compulsion to live up to such a psychological bondage (all with some emphasis). He need not try to be the perfect self, then, the super-image—and in fact to some extent found himself the supplicative (self?), knocking upon creaturehood’s earthly door, as any creature might ask aid from another who found himself wounded through misadventure. He found a mixed world—one hardly black or white, one with some considerable give-and-take, in which under even the most regrettable of circumstances there was (underlined) room for some action, for some improvement, for some decision, for some creative response. The rules of the game have therefore been automatically altered. The issues are clearer, dramatically etched.

We do not want long drawn-out discussions of why and what exactly happened, simply to understand the dynamics of the activity. Ruburt can work with the self-image he has now. It is imperfect, but it is pliable and willing to change.

(We were both very pleased with the session: It contains many important clues. The arthritis diagnosis, Jane said, would be the only one the medical profession could offer, with its very limited insights and viewpoint—whereas Seth has insisted all along that she didn’t have arthritis per se. I’d wanted him to at least refer to the arthritis subject tonight, hoping that the reinforced suggestions would help Jane mobilize her own strong creative powers. Equally important, too was Seth’s idea that Jane no longer needed to try to be “the perfect self.” Very important.

(Seth’s reference, above, to Jane’s fear of going too fast is a reference to an excerpt from the deleted session for January 28, 1981. I keep this excellent excerpt in the current notebook where I see it each time I open the book. It seems to me that it very neatly sums up the core of Jane’s difficulties—that one, along with a longer excerpt from the deleted session for January 26, 1981 just previous. That one concerns Jane’s fear of the spontaneous self, and how she regarded her immobility as a form of protection.