“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I’m bypassing the lengthy notes I wrote prefacing this session in order to get the material typed up itself the next day so that Jane can begin studying it. The session itself indicates, of course, the nature of the notes. I’ll add them to the end of the session.

(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.)

(10:32 PM. Jane had no idea of how she could “wake up” in her trance state instead of her usual awake state of consciousness.

(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.

(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.

(Yet even after this little confrontation, I found her asleep again when I returned from the bedroom with her office chair—the one I use now to take notes for sessions. Several ideas had come to me on my journey into the bedroom and back. I was about to leave Jane sleeping for the evening when she woke up. “I can tell you what I’m thinking,” I said, “or write down my ideas and you can read them later....” We ended up with my explaining my thoughts now.

(“I’m not saying all of this to blackmail you into going into the hospital,” I told Jane several times. “I gave up on that idea after Frank [Longwell] and I couldn’t convince you to try that course last summer. And with Jim Adams, too....”

(“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.

(Jane talked about writing poetry or novels instead, for example, and I replied that she would offer those products to herself and the public in an acceptable way to her own psyche. There’d be no conflict. “You haven’t walked in 13 months now,” I said, “so how can you say you’re getting better? I’m aware that you may be coping with certain challenges through the psychic method, so the question becomes one of how far you want to carry the thing. I myself would put physical survival before anything else, obviously, at least in this probability. Would you? I’ll have to admit that I wonder sometimes....”

(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.

(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.)