“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane slept late this morning, and after she had breakfast I read her last night’s session. We thought it excellent, of course. She now amazed me by saying that she now thought she understood that if she turned her focus away from her symptoms toward Prentice, say, or any other “outside” entity or situation, that she could improve physically by giving her body the freedom to do so. She sounded like things I’d said—and Seth too—many, many times; I’d thought she understood this. The notion is an important breakthrough for her, and one that must be accomplished if she is to improve physically.

(That event, as well as the launching of the shuttle Sunday morning, had been very emotional doings for me, somewhat to my surprise. “But what makes me so furious,” I said to Jane Sunday, “is that the species has the ability to accomplish something like that, but then makes such a mess of things back home on the planet. I have the awful suspicion that if we had enough shuttle craft, and there was a habitable planet within range, that we’d move key members of the species there, start over and try to leave all of our troubles behind, instead of trying to solve them.”

(I kept trying to verbalize a thought that had come to me after supper tonight, but couldn’t get it out. “It’s got to do with understanding that one must protect or encourage personal integrity before anything else,” I said, “even if it means projecting one’s troubles out onto an entity like Prentice, the church, or whatever. Even though we can’t blame those entities, really, for doing much that we hadn’t allowed them to do....” But I knew I was trying to get at deeper approximations of some sort of truth, and so did Jane. As Seth says, we each do create our own reality.

For Ruburt: you do not lead people anywhere. You cannot force them to change their beliefs. (Long pause.) No most hypnotic fanatic leads any group of people astray. You make your own reality. The people use the materials of the world as they come into contact with them, in their own ways and for their own reasons. To imagine that you or anyone else can lead large masses of persons astray is a highly erroneous conception.

If you believe that your own great energy can lead others astray, you are actually saying that others have no power of their own. Ruburt has been extremely cautious in the past, wanting to make sure, as mentioned, that he was not leading others down the proverbial garden path. He did not feel the same way about his poetry, which largely in its way states the same messages that our own books do.

(“This morning Jane said she was beginning to understand that if she turned her focus away from her symptoms, toward some place outside of herself, that she might improve by giving her body the freedom to do so. I was surprised, because I thought she understood this.”)

I am not implying that he was so fated to behave. The prosaic reasons for the beliefs, however, do lie in his private background and to that extent in experiences humiliating for an adult to recall. Instead, Ruburt tells himself he should be above such feelings, or that they simply should no longer apply. They are not destined to apply, but there is a give-and-take between the future and the past. Understanding those issues can further help Ruburt give up the entire construct.

(“Do we need the material?”