“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.

(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.”

(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.

In a larger sense, for example, the Catholic Church was originally formed as a psychic organization, on psychic levels, by large groups of individuals, as the mass psyche formed the basis of Christianity.

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.

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.

Most people operate at one largely exclusive state of consciousness. Even most creative work is done at the recognized threshold of the normal waking consciousness. Ruburt was presented with—or presented himself with—a situation in which large portions of his creative life appeared in books that were written in another state of consciousness entirely. Little wonder, then, that he felt he must alert all natural and normal controls.

(Long pause.) In that regard his symptoms developed more along the lines of exerting caution rather than, say, seeking protection. (Long pause.)It is as if someone on his own developed a spectacular amazing fast craft, and built a secondary system—a backup system—that allowed for great braking power in case this was necessary to offset the craft’s own speed.

(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.

(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.

Since Ruburt’s work involved him most directly in an examination of the self and in the unknown reaches of the psyche, then his experiences led him into a conflict with the idea of the Sinful Self. One of the main points of his work, and mine, is the definition of the well-intentioned self, of course. Ruburt was to some extent afraid to accept that concept fully—therefore he has been unable to utilize it fully in his mistaken belief that he must maintain a largely critical stance.

(“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.”)

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.

(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.

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.