“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(In the notes preceding the last session I wrote that Jane was to call Tam about the date of publication for Mass Events and God of Jane. She’d called, and Tam was to call back yesterday or today with the information. The expected call came as I finished reading to Jane at breakfast time—but it wasn’t from Tam: Ethel Waters apologized for the fact that now Mass Events has been delayed until May 19, or just possibly only May 4. Mass Events and God of Jane are now due to be published in the same month. The news tied in with Jane’s upsetting dream of April 12—see the copy attached to the last session; this makes the dream precognitive in at least some sense.

(At first we were unhappy with the delay, but then began to see it as probably a good thing. For it gave us the extra time to have these sessions before the book’s publication. If we needed preparation for any reactions after publication, etc.

(I reread last night’s session to Jane after supper, since today I didn’t make even a start at getting it typed. I painted for an hour this morning while Jane slept, but felt a peculiar heaviness or loginess I was unaccustomed to. By noon I was having trouble keeping awake. A nervous physical reaction—including my stomach and back upsets—to yesterday’s personal events, I thought. Jane also felt it. We went to bed at 2 PM and slept until supper time, after watching the perfect reentry and landing of Columbia, the country’s first space shuttle.

(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.”

(Because of our changed schedule, Jane had gone to the john only twice by supper time, whereas I’d envisioned at least three visits to that abode for her by now. Nor have we done anything about trying for a step a day with the aid of the typing table. But I told her before the session that I wasn’t yet going to dispense with the list I’d originated yesterday, including possible hospital treatment.

(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.

The books are different, however, while the poetry carries the more clearly recognizable stamp of his accepted identity, so he was afraid that I would lead people astray unwittingly perhaps, through the energy and power of our communications. That worry persisted, regardless of what kind of status he assigned to me. The relationship, of course, is unusual: very few people have such issues to contend with. Ruburt discovered how basically easy it was to have our sessions. But also how basically easy it was for his, say, Cézanne and James books also, for creatively he moved very quickly.

(10:12.) In other words, he felt he needed a countering force for his own spontaneity. He received some ideas of that nature from you in the past. In a way the symptoms were almost a method of presentation that in another fashion completely paralleled your own notes (an excellent point). In that regard they were meant to show that he was as reasonable, orderly, critical and responsible as your notes certainly showed you to be. The symptoms have fluctuated, serving sometimes one purpose more than the other—but what you have overall is a belief in a kind of braking power with which to handle spontaneous activity.

Again, that belief in the need for control is rooted in the earlier concepts of the Sinful Self (long pause)—concepts that have come to the fore in current contemporary world events with the new attention being given to religious cults and religions. Current events can trigger such reactions, therefore. Ruburt has told himself that such feelings were beneath him, but often the feelings themselves went underground. Those feelings were nearly incomprehensible to you, so that it was difficult for you to see how they could even be taken seriously.

Again, the issue is not some hypothetical one, but one that directly affects people’s most private actions. It must be swept aside, and recognized clearly as having no natural part to play, for it is an anti-natural concept, flying in the face of the good intent of each of nature’s individuals of whatever species.

He has had such glimmerings briefly in the past, but was not able to separate himself far enough from his physical situation to understand that issue clearly.

His mother told him he ruined everyone he touched. Those experiences were relatively unfortunate enough, but they were a part of the early life of someone who later finds themselves embarked upon in the study of the very nature of the self, so that they led him to believe that strong cautionary methods must be used. Period.

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.

(10:58 PM. I was glad I’d asked the second question in particular—at first I’d found it hard to believe that Jane thought of herself as evil for any reason, parents or whatever. Not that we hadn’t known from earlier material and our own conscious experiences that her mother especially had often exerted an unhealthy pressure upon the daughter—but I’d been taken back to realize that Seth was actually saying that Jane had considered herself evil.