“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.

(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.”

(“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?”

(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....”

(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.)