“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.

(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.