“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After supper today Jane said that for the first time in some little while she went to the john without a feeling of panic. She did a little better. I’m just finishing typing last Monday’s session, the first in our new series, but already I think the program has helped her.

(She’s been sleeping in the mornings because I haven’t called her at 6:15 when I get up, but starting tomorrow she plans to get up with me so we have enough time through the day to do more things. Jane still hasn’t been going to the john more than three times a day, nor have we yet tried point 4 on my list: taking one step a day with the aid of the typing table. She slept well last night. I also feel better following my exhaustion of yesterday. Frank Longwell visited this noon.

(I was so absorbed typing that Jane had to call me three times for the session. Finally I heard her at 8:50. Once again we sat waiting, she on the couch as before. I mentioned what Seth had said about her father in the last session, and asked her if she thought material on her mother might help. To my surprise Jane agreed. But I didn’t want such material to interrupt whatever Seth might be planning for tonight.)

When Ruburt left the Church, the concept of the Sinful Self was still there, but the methods that earlier served to relieve its pressures were no longer effectively present. The concept was shifted over to the flawed self of scientific vintage.

(Long pause at 9:20.) Ruburt’s creative nature early began to perceive at least that man’s existence contained other realities that were deeper. (Long pause.) Some of this is difficult to separate. To leave the church, say, meant to carry still some of the old beliefs, but without the Band-Aids that earlier offered some protection.

In that regard, Ruburt’s creativity kept struggling for its own growth and value fulfillment. His psychic recognition or initiation represented a remarkable breakthrough, meant to give him that additional psychic room that would insure the continued expansion of the abilities of the natural self. The Sinful Self concept is a personal one for each who holds it, but it is also projected outward onto the entire species, of course, until the whole world seems tainted.

At the time the sessions began (pause), the world was beginning to seem senseless, truly incomprehensible, to anyone who held any sense of poetry or sanity. Your private lives were showing their own difficulties, and the national situation was horrendous. Ruburt’s creativity broke through those frameworks to provide our sessions and to release the psychic abilities that had earlier been nearly but not completely repressed.

I have said that in almost every case of severe dissatisfaction or illness the underlying reasons will not so much be found in the discovery or expression of buried hate or aggression—though these may be present—but in the search for valued expression of value fulfillment that is for one reason or another being denied.

It is one thing to say that the dilemma is unfortunate, but it is also true to say that the dilemma existed because of a breakthrough that gave him what amounted to a new life at the time....

In the light of this discussion, now, that self was as unrealistic at its end of the spectrum as the Sinful Self was at the other, for Ruburt felt that he was supposed to demonstrate a certain kind of superhuman feat, not only managing on occasion to uncover glimpses of man’s greater abilities, but to demonstrate these competently at the drop of a hat, willingly at the request of others. At the same time he believed he was the Sinful Self, and that expression was highly dangerous—so between those two frameworks, the psychological organization, he operated as best he could, still seeking toward the natural value fulfillment that was his natural heritage.

(10:08.) The psychic abilities and the creative abilities—nearly impossible to separate—themselves provide all of the help that he requires, but the concept of the Sinful Self prevented him from using those abilities sufficiently—for how can the expressions of the Sinful Self be trusted?

A point: the answer does not lie for example in deciding not to finish my book (Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment). You are free to finish my book or not as you prefer, but not to finish it thinking that such an action will help solve your difficulties would not work.

(I should note that Jane seems to misunderstand my attitude here: the aim is not to use halting work on Seth’s latest book as a curative device, but to at least keep things from getting any worse. It came to seem to me that finishing this latest book would only be more of the same, with the same attitudes and beliefs behind it—hence, how could it help? I never told Jane, for example, to not finish the book. I did suggest that she hold off publication of it until we’d tried to learn something. Even so, it will be a long while before said volume is finished, let alone ready for the press. I devoutly hope we manage to learn something in the meantime. I only know, meanwhile, that what we have been doing so far has led to results that we fear. It will be interesting to see how this little dilemma is resolved, and what the long range results are, if any.)

The creative abilities, again, can help provide the necessary psychological motion and direction—they have in a large regard in the past, but they have not gone far enough. They have not gone far enough because Ruburt did not come to terms with his private version of the Sinful Self, and therefore still kept himself open to all of the negative conditioning that is so involved there: a conditioning that views all creative expression with distrust.

(But I stressed that no matter what she did about books, no matter what hassles we might get involved in about that activity, she just couldn’t give up physical mobility in order to express any lack of psychological mobility that we might become involved in. It was too high a price to pay, too unnecessary. “You just can’t,” I said, “no matter what happens, professionally....” She agreed.

(I added that I’d had no idea that the idea of the Sinful Self occupied that prominent and basic a position in her life. It was beginning to look as if the Sinful Self concept occupied the central position in her beliefs. It would make a lot of sense, I said, if it were true, and would account for things like an obsession with work, giving up other life activities, etc.—all done in a disguised attempt to appease that Sinful Self that merrily carried on year after year.... “But in a funny way that may be okay,” I mused, “because if that’s it, we now know where we can grab hold of the Sinful Self, once we know what we’re doing, not groping around in a morass of suppositions and speculations.”)