“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We really wanted this session, although at 7:30 PM Jane was so far out of it that I didn’t know whether she’d make it or not. She said she’d try, and I hoped the session would come about.

(For last night had been one of her most uncomfortable yet. She woke me up crying at 4 AM, with flashing, shooting sensations in her right leg, from the hip all the way down to the foot. “By the time it reaches the foot, it almost feels good,” she said. She’d taken Bufferin but it hadn’t seemed to help much. She has had similar sensations in recent days—see the chronology for the weekend as listed below—but last night they were steadier and more intense. Jane also had another series of dreams, but unfortunately could remember hardly anything of them. I rubbed her legs for half an hour, then she fell asleep. In fact, she was snoring before I could get back to sleep myself.

(Jane slept until noon, and again during the morning thrashed about often in her sleep, and sometimes whimpered or cried out, presumably because of a dream. Yet when I called her she said she’d slept well. The hot, shooting sensations continued in her right leg, though to a lesser degree. Frank Longwell visited this noon, and massaged her legs also. He said the sensations were a positive, therapeutic sign of “nerve activity.” Yet Jane was back in bed by 3 PM, and slept until suppertime.

(Frank, incidentally, had brought a ladder so he could get upon the roof to look down our chimney in an effort to see what creatures were causing the rumpus in the fireplace above the damper. With my flashlight, he glimpsed a medium-sized coon, but couldn’t tell if it was male or female, or whether it had young. He returned at 5 PM to drop a heavy rope down the chimney in the hope the raccoon might climb out. But then, I thought, it must be getting in and out by itself all along, for at least three weeks now, and I was sure that late at night I could hear more than one voice chattering above the damper. It certainly seemed that parents were feeding the young.)

(Frank, also, has never come across another case like Jane’s, from the days he was a chiropractor until now. He said that doctors would have trouble diagnosing her symptoms. If memory serves, Seth said a long time ago that Jane did not have arthritis, but for her own reasons was mimicking her mother’s disease. Jane is really bothered, though, and we trust that Seth was correct in the last session when he said this phase of Jane’s symptoms would soon pass.

(I showed Jane a copy again of my dream of April 23, and asked that Seth discuss it this evening, since I was sure it contained at least some positive omens for her.

(Now here is a brief chronology pertaining to Jane’s symptoms from last Saturday, the day after the last session was held:

(Then before supper on Saturday she began to feel new, very strange sensations: painful in the hip, but much more pleasant by the time they reached the foot. Sometimes she made nearly involuntary quick movements of the leg or foot. We thought this added feeling of sensation might be the result of the last couple of sessions especially. Walter Zeh was her first husband.

(Once again she sat on the couch, and I sat in her chair facing her across the coffee table—with behind me, the closed-off fireplace. Up beyond the damper, I could easily hear our raccoon guests busily chattering away: perhaps it was feeding time, their noise was loud, now—a sure sign of growing things, I thought. I thought the racket might disturb Jane going into trance, but such wasn’t the case.)

(Long pause at 8:42.) The Sinful Self is of course put upon, turned into what it is. It is not a natural psychological construct, so when it is allowed to it naturally seeks its own release also, when it is denied communication that is most difficult. Some of last night’s dream material dealt with the ideas, again, of creativity—sometimes seen as harmless enough for children, as in the play Ruburt remembered taking part in his Catholic public school. In larger measure, however, creativity was considered something that adults grew out of, a mark of a prolonged adolescence, particularly unsuited for the woman whose thoughts were meant to turn toward husband and child.

The creativity for which Ruburt was praised as a child—the writing of his poetry, for example, became more and more frowned upon by the church as he became older, and in particular when the poetry contained concepts that did not fit Christian dogma.

(Now the noise in the fireplace was fluctuating.) There you run into problems involved with Catholic or Christian devotion, the natural feedback needed in the development of creative work, and the striking originality of creative ventures that strike out on their own, forming their own paths.

(Pause at 8:56.) The intensity of the hip and leg sensations has already reached a peak, and will be subsiding—and your own assistance last evening was invaluable. The main issue, again, is to reassure that one important portion of Ruburt’s personality that the self is not sinful, not bad or evil, and to show it the limited nature of the framework that so defined it.

(And Jane’s leg sensations had returned to a degree. There was no doubt that she was uncomfortable as she sat on the couch. She didn’t know whether to watch television or have a cookie and milk, or go sit on the bed and make a few notes. As it turned out, we did go to bed perhaps half an hour early.)