“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.

(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.

(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.

(Long pause.) He felt it his duty to examine his psychic material with supercritical force, since it seemed to come from the other side of consciousness, so to speak, and since it presented such a different picture of all aspects of reality. (Pause.) His symptoms served other purposes as well, though, as has been given often. In a fashion they served as regulators that he felt at one time allowed him to live on an even course, tempering spontaneity or psychic exploration lest it progress too quickly for him to follow, yet also protecting him from other distractions so that he could continue his explorations.

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.