“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(For the first time in a very long while, most of last week’s mail remains unanswered—sitting in the basket on the table at the end of the couch. Another batch of letters arrived from Prentice-Hall today, adding to the pile. Some of the letters are great, others very depressing. In other words, they range over the usual human situations we encounter. One even took us to task for “obscenities” in Volume 2 of “Unknown.” Jane and I have been talking about how best to deal with the implications of the mail—it often bothers her—but haven’t reached any conclusions. There may not be any simple one way to handle the situation. I ask a question or two about it in my list of questions for Seth.

(“Well, at least I’m somewhat comfortable in the chair tonight,” Jane said as we waited at 8:58. “I can lean back somewhat—but I’m always the most uncomfortable in the chair. I don’t know what I’m doing here instead of being in bed. Well, I’ll be ready in a minute....” Yet at the same time she sat stiffly forward, her body canted to her left; she didn’t look comfortable, and she decided to try the foam rubber pads beneath her thighs, a move that sometimes “helps relieve the pressure on those [pelvic] bones back there, and keeps me from feeling that I’m falling forward. They also help me when I move around in the chair.” Her talk reminded me, paradoxically, that last night while sitting on the couch she’d been able to cross her legs in a way she hadn’t been able to do for a long time.

(Pause.) If such an individual can convince himself or herself that somehow the entire affair is more in the nature of a game, then you can have at times some success, because in a game the conscious mind is willing to make allowances, and to “pretend.” In a good variety of cases, however, the formal experiment itself sets up a barrier, for the conscious mind is being asked to cooperate in a venture that it considers nearly an impossibility.