“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.

(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.

(Ethel, incidentally, told Jane that she too has trouble communicating with Prentice’s legal department, just as it seems everyone else does.

(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.

(“I very vaguely feel him around,” Jane said at 9:30, after we’d been sitting for the session since 9:10. I’d been busy with these notes while waiting. Earlier, she’d finished a small acrylic still life of flowers and fruit.)

(“These must be hard for me to give, or something,” Jane said at 9:40, “or I wouldn’t be still sitting here waiting....” Then:)

(10:22.) It was in Mass Events and God of Jane that the usual concept of the Sinful Self was most directly and vigorously addressed, and in which the value of individual impulses was stressed with consistent vigor. Ruburt has been dealing with that material since then. (Pause.) Many people in your society and others are dealing precisely with the same issues, though in different contexts.

(“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.”)

(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.

(“This Sinful Self thing is liable to turn into the primary cause behind the whole business,” I said to Jane. “Imagine—atonement, self-punishment for things learned more than 40 years ago. Incredible.”

(“How are you going to handle a session a night?” Jane asked.