“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.)

(“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’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.