“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(Long pause.) I have remarked before that part of the problem lies in discrepancies of growth. You spoke (today) of some artists painting formula paintings. For Ruburt to try to publish usual novels, for example, would not work: he has outgrown the formulas. At the same time, for many reasons there has been a difficulty in accepting the natural patterns of his own individualistic growth—and that is partially because there were no neat categories in which they seemed to naturally fall. So in searching out new ways, personally and creatively, Ruburt felt himself on insecure ground.

All of this involves you in the private nitty-gritty of dealing with the ways of thinking and reasoning that are so characteristic in your society and in your time. In certain areas where the contrasts in the other direction are as startling, you have largely escaped such conditioned behavior. You have escaped it because you have learned and grown easier in those directions—or you both consciously and unconsciously applied new concepts to those other areas.

(Seth replied patiently:) I am giving you the best information that I can, and it would be better if you read the session thoroughly and understood it before forming new questions.

(“All right, but nothing I’ve said here is new. I’ve had these questions for years.”)