“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Very long pause—one of many such—at 9:59.) I would never stand in the way, however, of Ruburt’s recovery as you understood it. Nor would I feel that Ruburt has let me down, or that you had in any way. Ruburt does need a return to an earlier orientation. That sense of beauty, that reorientation, can relieve the feeling of responsibility that he has at times taken upon himself. He needs an orientation toward the simpler issues—those that carry within themselves a simpler childlike magic. He needs to turn away from an overconcern with life’s more ‘“weighty problems,” to lose the feeling that it is up to him to solve those problems for himself and you and for the world.

(More and more slowly:) Most of that should be obvious to you. The stresses and strains are in a fashion not simply those of one person and that person’s relationship with his own nature. Those (underlined) issues are compounded by Ruburt understanding as of now of other people’s lives as they write to you. At the same time he does not deal directly with such people, so he cannot follow through, for example, as a therapist might. His class gave him some direct encounters through the years as he personally helped to direct others, and could watch the results through their achievement or behavior.

(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.

(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.)

(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.

(“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....”

(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.)