“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Very long pause at 10:16.) The other comments are simply handy Band-Aids, so to speak, but are extremely healthy along the way. When he feels panicky your loving touch—a light quick massage or embrace—acts as quickly on the nervous system as anything else, and far faster than any medicine. Animals even have long been aware of such immediate therapeutic action.

(Very long pause at 10:21.) The statements I have made regarding the innate nature of the spontaneous self can be of the greatest service if they are accepted. You are trying to redefine the very definitions of personal identity—no easy task. Not just Ruburt alone but the people of the world are, one way or another, now in the process of just such a redefinition. It is impossible to assign some time element to that (underlined) kind of assignment.

There is little else this evening for me to say, but I will indeed make whatever further connections I might make, and I will add my own help and energy to him at whatever levels they can be most useful.

(I hurried to type the Seth portion of the session so that Jane could read it this evening—Wednesday—but from my writing room I can hear her snoring as she sleeps on the couch in the living room. So I’ll begin my own notes.... They will be something of a hodgepodge, not always in chronological order, and are intended only to summarize our discussion before the session.

(“And don’t tell me you’re present state means that you’re getting better — like Seth does—because you’re not. Don’t have Seth tell me in the sessions that you’re working out problems and that we’ll soon see improvements, because it doesn’t happen. It hasn’t happened for years. I’m on the point—I’m very close—to telling you that I’ll refuse to cooperate on the sessions any longer, meaning that I’ll be trying once more to save you from disaster. You’ll end up talking to the wall if you want to have a session, or into a recorder if you can learn to do it. I can’t stop you from doing it by yourself, or with someone else, but I can refuse to encourage you myself.”

(“I don’t want to do that,” Jane said about the hospital idea. “I wouldn’t mind trying some things on my own, here at the house, like getting an eye, ear and nose doctor here, or an orthopedist—but no hospital. But I’m shocked at what you’re saying.”

(“No, not at all.” Jane had much more to say, of course, which can only be summarized here. I saw that our conversation was taking up much more time before the session than I wanted to spend—but then I’d known it would, I suppose. Her main concern at the moment was to express puzzlement that she could be so consciously unaware of what her real desires were, if I was right about her wanting to quit the sessions. I told her I thought we’d had plenty of clues as to her true resistance to them ever since the inception of Mass Events and the numerous delays involving that work. The delays had merely accelerated since then, so now it seemed to me that the real desire was pretty obvious, given the episodic method of holding sessions these days.

(“I’ve thought more and more lately about what happens when a person is born with very strong gifts—but can’t stand to use them, or has to pay a very high price indeed if they do try to use them. At first glance it seems contradictory of nature to do that, or to make such a conflict possible, yet it must happen all the time. I used to think that if a person had a strong gift that nothing would stop the ability from showing itself in that certain way—but now I don’t think so at all. Now I think things are far from that simple. I think a talent can be completely buried, or show up in probabilities, or be transformed or translated in a million different ways, as many ways as there are people. Or it can just be left alone during a life, for whatever reasons.”

(Jane said that lately she’d “felt good” about getting back to work on Seth’s Dreams and her own Magical Approach, although actually she hasn’t done much on either of those projects for a very long time now. I also wanted to know what she meant about feeling good, when this noon she’d spent much time listing all the ways in which she didn’t feel good, today. At lunchtime she said she felt panicky, and hadn’t done anything that morning. After lunch we used the pendulum to try to find out something about the reasons for her panic, but had little success. As I told her today, and had a few days ago, it appeared that she was embarked on a long-range campaign to eliminate her communication with the rest of the world, the environment she lives in. “And what’s left of the psychic thing anyway except for an occasional session?” I asked. She’s now developed difficulties with vision, hearing—especially in the left ear—walking, and practically all physical activities except sitting at her table or desk, or on the couch watching TV. The hearing trouble, a recent development comparatively, has already cut down on our mutual communication, for almost automatically I’ve stopped speaking to her unless we’re facing one another; and then I often have to repeat myself, so that our conversation becomes more episodic and the easy exchange is lost. Jane has also cut her trips to the john to just three times a day —incredible! Her feet became badly swollen last summer, and stayed that way for many weeks. Very alarming, and now that the swelling has subsided to some extent she’d left with feet covered with a tough leathery skin that bears no detail and scales off in dead flakes.

(Actually, I said in conclusion, there wasn’t too much left to sacrifice. She usually sits at her table in the morning and afternoons until going to the john around 4 PM; usually she doesn’t do much in this period. Reading mail may take an hour of more of it in midday. She may make a few notes or try for a poem, or leaf through the manuscript for Magical Approach, or Dreams, or read a few later sessions for herself. When she sits on the couch at perhaps 4:30, that’s it for the day: She’ll seldom read while there, but naps or looks at TV.

(“But that would be awful to give up the sessions,” she exclaimed as I wheeled her on her chair into the bathroom after we’d had tonight’s session.

(And while she did so, what would happen? I wouldn’t want to know in advance if I could. Where—how—does one find and/or make that leap of faith Seth talked about in the session? I fully agree that that leap of faith could be the key to solving the predicament we’re in. I’ll suggest to Jane that we try to cultivate such a state by starting—again—a daily program of reading the material together, probably after breakfast. It’s not that I even disagree with Seth in his material, or find it unacceptable. It is that it doesn’t work for us the way we want it to. It’s also that I think many things are left unsaid or unexplored in the sessions, probably because they are sensitive to Jane or she may block them on unconscious levels. Tonight, I told her, Seth said nothing at all about what I regard as the central point of conflict—the conflict between her Sinful Self, so-called, and the spontaneous self. For I consider that argument, that unresolved conflict, to be at the heart of her difficulties. I even agree that such an argument may well be successfully solved in other probabilities, and that in larger terms that’s an entirely acceptable way for things to work within nature’s larger scheme of things. But that, then, still leaves us with the challenge of coping with something much less than a successful solution here in this reality. And there must be resolutions possible here, too, I do believe. We have much to learn.)