“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

DELETED SESSION

(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.]

(We have had two short “sessions,” during which Jane dictated passages for the intro to Dreams while I wrote down her words. Not Seth trances, by the way. She did this work herself, presumably in a sort of altered state, and has made a good start here. I have yet to type that material, but will start it after finishing this session.

(Jane still nods off as she sits in her chair, especially after supper, which we take to be an indication that her thyroid is still below par, although she’s much improved in that regard over her condition before she entered the hospital. The drifting off worries her, however. Even as I sat beside her at the round card table in the living room, writing these notes, she kept nodding off into sleep. I’d spent some little time trying to talk her into a short session to begin with, and she’d finally agreed to try for one. It was 8:52 when she really fell asleep in her chair, for perhaps the tenth time. I could see that we’d get no session tonight. Yet she woke up. “I’m just waiting—I feel so funny....”

(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.

(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.