“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.

(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.

(“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?”

(“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’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....”

(“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.