“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I do admit that from your standpoint—or viewpoint—that it may be very difficult to accept some of the statements that I make—that appear perhaps even to be directly contradictory to your observation of Ruburt on a daily basis, and to his own experience of himself.

(Now, in the midst of another long pause, her eyes closed, Jane began snoring: She was asleep—briefly. I couldn’t remember her doing this in any of the more than one thousand other sessions we’ve held. She came back to her Seth consciousness with a start.)

(At about 8 PM this evening Jane fell asleep with a lighted cigarette in her hand as she sat leaning back on the couch. She’d told me a few minutes earlier that she wanted to have a session on herself tonight, and when I came out into the living room with my notebook I found her asleep for the second or third time since supper. The cigarette event was bad news, I saw at once, let alone Jane’s sleeping after stating that she wanted the session. I stood watching her sleeping while the cigarette burned down toward her fingers. A long cone of ashes fell onto her lap while I wondered what to do about the session. When the smoke reached a certain point close to her fingers—I wouldn’t have let her burn herself —she woke up with a start and stubbed the cigarette in the ashtray.

(She looked somewhat chagrined, while I explained what had happened. “I never, never do that when I’m here alone,” she said in answer to my question about consequences. I could only hope she meant it.

(“It came to me rather clearly just now that you don’t want to continue with the sessions anymore,” I said. “I think we’re surrounded by all kinds of evidence to that effect. Every delay or missed session is a clue, for you never offer to make them up, nor have you for a long time now said let’s have a spontaneous session. You don’t stick to any kind of a loose schedule. I think a strong part of you is now so against the whole psychic thing that you’ve ended up in an awful position physically because of the conflicts involved—pulling you this way and that. You’re now about 90% helpless, so you’re—we’re—not solving the problems, are we? How far do you want to carry this business before we make some changes, like dispensing with the sessions and the psychic life?”

(“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.”

(“So if the next few sessions don’t give some clues as to what’s going on,” I said, “it may mean the end of the sessions.... It may very well be time to do something else with the balance of our lives. What I think—and have, often lately—about illness is that we know so little about it that we’re still literally in the dark ages in that respect. I’ve felt that way for some time, now—that our understanding of what human beings are is minute at best. I think it’s very dangerous to take too hard a position at this time on anything we think we’ve learned, for I can’t imagine that in future millennia we’ll ever cling to very much of what we think is ‘true’ today—especially about things like illness. In the meantime we’re groping around in the dark. To ask any one person to figure it all out now, and affect a cure on themselves, may simply be asking too much most of the time.... Learning about our abilities and capabilities is a social and cultural affair, and you—anyone—need help. Lots of it—only what does one do in the meantime while trying to learn a few things?”

(“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.”

(“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.”

(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.

(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.)