“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A note: Jane has mentioned several times since returning home that Seth may dictate a biography of her—presumably including her hospital experiences, etc. It took me a few days to realize that this is a unique idea—certainly it hasn’t been done before. “Every so often I get ideas about it,” she said, but not from Seth, at least yet.... that when you’re a kid you pick up certain ideas about what kind of a person you want to be—from a photograph, a corner of life, an edge, and you put all those little things together into a personality. You draw upon the people you share your new environment with. Everybody does this, and it’s much more forceful a thing in the formation of personality that people realize....”

(The contradictory thing was, as I’d told her the other day, that I didn’t think we were going to get anywhere in solving our dilemmas until we tapped into the session routine again. Otherwise, we’d be left to struggle within the establishment just as everyone else did. Yet each time I wanted to try something, Jane was having difficulty focusing. Just as I was about to give up for this evening, Jane came awake again and said rather firmly, “I’ve passed a certain point, Bob, and now I can do it....” meaning that she’d have a session after all. “But it’ll be a real short one.” And I knew it would be good.

For all of his and your complaining, you understand in rather good measure the decisions and actions that motivate your lives, so that Ruburt is more than usually aware of the manipulations that psychologically and physically lie just beneath the material usually carried by what is ordinarily called the conscious mind.

(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.

(9:25 PM. Jane’s pace had generally been okay, considering the circumstances. “I felt like when I got slow there a couple of times that it didn’t have anything to do with dozing off,” she said, referring to a few longer pauses. “It was just a normal, I don’t know, thing....” I told her she’d done well. “It was more than I thought I could do,” she said, “but I really got worried tonight when I started dozing off like that.” I replied that all along I’d felt she could do more than she’d thought she could, and such had been the case.

(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.

(A note: I haven’t answered fan mail since bringing Jane home from the hospital on March 28, and already it is beginning to pile up. I kept up with it religiously while visiting Jane each day for the month she was in the hospital. Since returning to the house, though, I’ve had absolutely no time at all for the mail, and have stopped answering it except for business and an occasional exceptional letter, or a request for a visit, etc. I don’t know whether I regret my actions or not. Now the mail has retreated way into the background, even though I don’t forget what it means, that we get such a response from what we do, and that each of those writers is sincere, and in my opinion deserving of an answer.