“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(7:30 PM. I’m starting these notes in advance of tonight’s session without being really sure that Jane will hold one—although I think she plans to. Once again she slept several hours in the middle of the day. Right now she’s sitting on the couch, feeling quite relaxed after eating supper, watching the TV news. As for myself, I want to try to reconstruct our after-breakfast discussion of today.

(As we began to reread Monday’s session this morning, Jane said something that triggered a reaction on my part that I felt was based on material Seth gave in that session: “I tell my body every day that I trust it, that it can bear my weight when I go to the john, for example,” or words closely to that effect. Suddenly it came to me that she had it backwards—that her body didn’t need any additional trust, that it was perfectly willing to do her bidding at any time, including healing itself. What she should be stressing, I said, was that she trusted her spontaneous self—then the body would automatically react to the release of tension, to her trust in that spontaneous self. Put another way, the intellect then must learn to cooperate in that trusting by relaxing its near-paranoid protective cover.

(All of this is a simplification, of course, for we had a rather lengthy discussion about it. Yet I could see that I confused Jane somewhat: for she’d used that typical suggestion about trusting her body for years, and I had agreed with it, at least tacitly, besides using similar suggestions myself at times.

(But with a new insight growing out of this month’s series of private sessions, I explained, I now felt that one could more directly get at the heart of one’s challenges, instead of trying to cajole the body into behaving differently—after all, the body’s condition was the result of certain ways of thinking, not the cause of the trouble. In addition, it was obvious that the body hadn’t responded to those habitual suggestions over the years, so something else was needed. The cause of Jane’s symptoms is her fear of the spontaneous self—that is the area that needs treatment. One might better address the fears of being the public person, for example, rather than trying to futilely patch up a body that was only faithfully following mirroring habits of deep and long standing.

(Now Jane agreed with all of this at the time, but later while painting I wondered whether I’d been too vehement in what I’d said. I didn’t want her to feel bad. And I learned during the day that our talk had upset her considerably, even though I’d told her I felt that there was “a lot of hope” in the ideas expressed in our discussion. Jane further echoed my concern when she said later that she didn’t know what suggestions to give herself when she went to the john, and later got onto the bed. Yet I felt that I was on to something good, and asked Jane pretty definitely to see that Seth discussed the subject tonight. I also wanted him to talk about the subject we’d mentioned for Monday night’s session, but which hadn’t been covered: the reasons for her sore backside, and what she could do to help ease her hip and leg discomfort. Somehow we got totally off that subject when Seth went into the interesting topic of PKMB, or psychokinetic metal bending. But at this time in these sessions we’ve got to get all the new data we can to help in our own hassles.

(At lunchtime Frank Longwell dropped off a medical device that’s used to transfer moist heat to the body. After lunch I fussed with transplanting a cutting of Swedish ivy while Jane slept. I also wanted to try to make up some of the painting time I’d lost this morning. As I finished cleaning up the planter I came up with another of the “insights” I’ve been getting since we started this series of private sessions on February 4, 1981; see my notes at the end of the session for February 11.

(“Insight, February 25, 1981, 1:20 PM. Although Jane enjoys the sessions, as Seth himself said in the session for February 1, 1981 She is still somewhat afraid of what he will produce in the future—new theories and ideas that either might or will place her in further confrontation with the major tenets of our ordinary world—meaning science, religion, medicine, history, whatever. She fears then, Seth going too far as an expression of her creative and spontaneous self. This expression then must be kept within strict, safe limits. This fear of future developments ties in very well with her natural concerns about becoming a public figure, one that should be able to solve the world’s problems. Once more, I know I’m on to something here, while agreeing in advance that I’ve expressed the insight in simplistic terms.”

(“The insight also reminds me of one of my questions for Seth: I plan to ask him for hints about what sort of ideas he would advance if he’s given the freedom to do so by Jane. He’s already alluded to this notion through a rather recent reference to the fact that he “toned down” some of his material for Mass Events in order to make it more acceptable. I now wish I’d asked him at the time, acceptable to whom? Jane and me, Prentice-Hall, the world, critics, the post office?”

(I should add, too, that this latest insight ties in well with the paragraph of Seth’s that I’ve copied from the deleted session for January 28, 1981, to add to my list of quotations from these recent private sessions: Seth discussed Jane’s fear of letting go —not because she is afraid of relaxing per se, but because she fears she will go too far.

(Jane called me for the session at 8:25. “I don’t feel Seth around and I don’t feel like a session,” she said, “but I guess I’d better....” We sat waiting for some time. I showed her my rough notes on the latest insight, and took pains to explain to her that it wasn’t a negative statement, but one that I saw as having only beneficial connotations. “What I think would happen if Seth were free to do anything he wanted to, would be great,” I said. “Whether it was ever published or not. We can talk about it later.” We agreed the insight represented something of a new idea.

(“I might have bitten off more than I can chew,” Jane said at 8:43. “But I assume Seth would have said a lot more about things like UFO’s, Atlantis and reincarnation if I’d let him.... I replied that it hardly mattered, that the time element entered in, that we’d still want material on the subjects we were interested in, that Atlantis was “way down the list.”

(Finally, as Jane sat quite upright in her chair, she began feeling Seth around. At the same time she talked about how upset she was at sleeping during the day; and added to her upset now was the question of what suggestions to use. She talked about having a “breakthrough” session to clear up her hassles. Then:)

The change itself, and the relaxations, give him a feeling sometimes of having no firm support (as Jane said earlier today). He should try to talk with you, however, when he is anxious, to foreshorten such periods. The fears do indeed prolong this particular period.

(9:47 PM. “That was short,” Jane said, “but I wanted something that will help now.” Her delivery had been okay. I said I’d read it to her in the morning before I had it typed.

(Actually it’s Friday night as I finish this typing, and I read the untyped portions of the session to Jane each morning as I had it in progress. It has been a lot of help. She’s sleeping better, and yet is still uncomfortable on her bottom and legs. The fears continue to surface. I’d say she’s doing very well, and it seems that this time we are really making progress. Another brief insight came to me yesterday, which I told her about: simply that she’d given up her own volition to one part of her personality. I mentioned it because she discussed the question of volition in God of Jane; she thought the insight made sense.)