“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(“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.”

(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.

The body is softening. The affair frightens him nevertheless because, as mentioned earlier, he identifies strongly with his own bodily tensions. Letting them go brings him into a more or less constant encounter with many of the fears that helped generate them. Some of these have to do with an erroneous idea of relaxation in general, of course, with his father, and with spontaneity.

It often seems to him that to relax is to be lax, to let down, do nothing, achieve nothing, as if spontaneously left alone he would be lazy, unambitious, and again lax. He has those feelings and fears. (Pause.) At the same time there are feelings that to relax would be to let go too much (louder)—slide into overly spontaneous behavior, to lack control over one’s life, to lose the observer’s fine focus. As his body begins to relax—as indeed it has—those feelings become more prominent than before. Under the circumstances he is handling them rather well.

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.

(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.)