“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.”

(She spends a good deal of her waking time on the couch watching TV, or sleeping away part of the day.

(Several times during recent weeks I’ve said that I wished we’d withdrawn Mass Events from publication, using the disclaimer controversy as a ready-made excuse.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.

(1. We are going to have sessions nightly, or at least several times a week, in a last-ditch effort to get to the bottom of the problem.

(3. She is to start going to the john at least four times a day.

(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.)

(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.

Your feelings presently that Ruburt is on the brink of being bedridden are —mainly now—the results of negative conditioning—they seem very realistic. Certainly the evidence seems (underlined) to give those feelings at least some support. They are the end result of a recent concentration upon the problem. And in this case you both fell into their sway at the same time.

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.

(Pause at 9:41.) You are conditioned to behave in certain fashions in times of stress, so it is indeed at such periods that old beliefs often seem to emerge with fresh force. I will deal with the situations involved, but I will also try to elicit the creative use of your own psychic and mental abilities, so that they can be directed specifically toward clearing up such issues—and I am of course willing to have daily sessions at your request.

(My questions are paraphrases of the ones I actually asked Seth, since I didn’t take the time to write them down because of their length during the session itself. But much of the phrasing is almost verbatim, since I made notes after the session, besides remembering them clearly.

This subject is a part of one that I plan as an evening’s discussion. Before, the feelings of panic remained largely hidden, and he has felt to some degree stalled of course for some time, apart from the two books involved.

(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.

(“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.