“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.

(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.

(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.

(“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.”)

(Again I was surprised, and groped for words as Seth sat quietly waiting. “Wait a minute.... Are you actually saying that he feels that his mother and father both thought of him as evil—that now he thinks he’s that evil?”)

He thought that he was such a bad person that he drove his parents apart, perhaps caused his mother’s illness, perhaps his grandmother’s death—for which his mother did indeed several times blame him—and that the classical idea of the Sinful Self was individually interpreted in that manner in Ruburt’s personal early life.

(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.