“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We haven’t had a session for three weeks now. To my mind, our situation has steadily deteriorated. I think it came to a head yesterday, when I finally realized that for the last few days Jane had cut down her visits to the bathroom to just two times a day—upon arising, and before going to bed. Her reason for this, when I questioned her, was that “it hurts to move. But I’m working on it.”

(We’ve had several of our famous discussions since the last session on March 25. I feel caught in contradictions—for if Jane’s new feelings in her hips and legs are signs of new muscular activity, as she thinks, and as Frank Longwell agrees, that’s good news; yet those same feelings, her acute and prolonged bodily discomfort, her aches and pains, have caused her to become almost totally inactive. As I wrote in question 13 some weeks ago now, she has surrendered just about all activity except that involved with getting up and lying down, eating, going to the bathroom on a very limited basis, and puttering about in her breezeway writing room for an hour or so on occasion. She’s managed to get her poetry book out to Prentice, and now is not at work on any writing. She’s even let go writing up her recent dream material, some of which has been excellent, with apparent precognitive information of a positive nature.

(A remark she made yesterday probably had helped crystallize my own new determination to do something about what seemed to be a badly eroding situation: She said that Tam had recently told her that Mass Events was due to be published on the 13th—today—with God of Jane due out early in May. These two books are, I think we agree, the most recent triggers that she has responded to in a negative way, so yesterday I suddenly realized that Jane must be reacting presently to the imminent publication of those two works. It seemed obvious. I knew they were due out soon, but slipped up in my own awareness that their publication could—would cause her additional problems; my opinion was based on her paper of last December, in which she wrote that from its very inception she had been concerned about the reception Mass Events would be accorded by various elements of the public.

(I still think that paper is a very revealing one, for it contains several important clues that we should keep always in mind, but often do not. Among them is Jane’s fear of the controversial nature of Seth’s medical material, which led to Prentice-Hall’s installation of the hated disclaimer.

(Several times during recent weeks I’ve said that I wished we’d withdrawn Mass Events from publication, using the disclaimer controversy as a ready-made excuse. The idea being that this would hopefully free Jane from worry on that score, at least. Yet working with the pendulum in the bedroom at 12:30 AM last night, she said she still wanted the book published—and therein lay at least one source of much trouble, I thought and said.

(The pendulum session was not a success, in my opinion. I didn’t think Jane asked specific-enough questions, that she was somehow reluctant to or unable to do so—even that she appeared to be somewhat ill at ease while using it. She was upset of course, and so was I. I went to bed very unhappy with our situation—and I suppose that that feeling helped lead me to the group of statements below the next morning, and this session.

(Jane didn’t sleep very well, so I didn’t call her this morning. Instead after breakfast I wrote down my list of points to discuss with her. I saw them as making a significant alteration—at least potentially—in our lives. But then, I thought, given our present situation our lives were going to change anyhow and perhaps drastically: her not going to the john properly wasn’t a good sign.

(Jane did get up by 10:30. and an hour later I initiated our little discussion. I read to her, and explained, each of the points on my list:

(6. The next step will be to seek medical help—namely, going to a hospital for tests, therapy, diagnosis, medication, whatever. I plan to ask Paul O’Neill about how to get her admitted, or at least examined. Or I’ll go to a hospital myself and ask to talk to someone. The idea isn’t that a stay in the hospital will work a miracle cure —though I’d be delighted if it did —but that some help or easing of Jane’s symptoms might eventually be achieved through therapy or whatever. My personal opinion at the moment is that we should have taken this step a long time ago. Interesting, to speculate about why I’ve concurred in Jane’s dogged avoidance in seeking establishment medical help.

(Jane didn’t react as much to point 6 as I thought she might. The last time I’d suggested that she consider getting medical help had been at Christmas time, when I asked her to think it over and let me know. But I haven’t heard a word on the subject from her.

(Jane has had several vivid dreams since we held the last session; they’ve been of the type described in recent private sessions—combinations of nightmarish events and characters, along with flashes of insight into the causes for the symptoms, and visions of herself walking normally, etc. But she’s written very little on them. However, they’ve been valuable in showing that she is still contending with previously buried fears. We keep hoping these will play in important part in letting her achieve more physical release. But at the moment it seems that everything is difficult, or worse, especially so when I worry about how far she has to go simply to get her legs to straighten out at least partially. I did feel, I told her, that a time of decision was very near.

(Jane sat on the couch in her usual position for the session, and I sat facing her across the coffee table while using her own chair. She spoke slowly much of the time, and often while sitting stiffly upright.)

(As soon as I’d finished reading my list of points to her, this morning, Jane called Tam about the publication of Mass Events. He told her the book hadn’t arrived in the office yet, but that he expected it to, and that he would check to see if it was on schedule. He would then send us the usual first copy.)

(This was one of the spots where I felt like interrupting Seth to protest that I for one—and Jane. too, I believe—do not take such benefits for granted. I try to be grateful each day for what we have, while still being aware that the mechanisms that deliver those benefits to us may operate largely on unconscious levels.)

(9:58 PM. Jane had done well. She was very quiet when she came out of trance. I felt that some sort of start had been made when I asked my questions and spoke my mind at the end of the session. As noted earlier, I’d wanted to interrupt a number of times while Seth was speaking.

(Jane remembered my talking to Seth—the longest exchange I’d had with him for years. She explained that in trance she was aware of my questions “in the back of her mind,” and of Seth answering them, and that in a way the questions would get in the way of what Seth was trying to say; they could interrupt too deeply; I’d known this from a few infrequent, much earlier, experiences in the sessions, and had often thought that if too persistent the questions could bring her out of trance. But now I felt that we had to do something drastic to make a start, and that we had achieved something.

(“We’ve got to get the information,” I told Jane, and found myself repeating a lot of what I’d said to Seth; I felt the emotional charges behind the questions once again. Jane was very glum. “But I’m running into trouble coping with this thing,” I told her, “and I need your help. I have to get it, too—otherwise there are going to be drastic changes in our lives.”

(“I don’t know.” Jane said quietly, even glumly.

(“Well, I know I’m right.” I said. “I’ve seen the same situation come up many times in the past, and let it go, but we can’t do that now....” And I didn’t even get to mention the doctor-hospital option to Seth. I did tell Jane I understood what Frank Longwell was doing, and appreciated his efforts to help, so generously given. But I added that FL could massage her legs “till doomsday,” and it would do little good until we came to terms with the basic causes behind the symptoms.

(See the attached dreams of Jane, for April 4, 6, and 12. The latter has a distinct bearing on the events of tomorrow morning, Tuesday the 14th.)