“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.

(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.

They do present difficulties, however, and are the cause of the panicky emotions he feels at times. The body’s relaxation is as of now uneven. Certain muscles relax for the first time in recent times, while others might momentarily contract so that balance is maintained—so the body is in a state of constant change.

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.

The idea that it is indeed safe to relax is important, coupled with the realization that all creativity is basically now—basically—effortless, and that this applies to the body’s motion also. When he is effortlessly creating a poem he is not worried that he is relaxing too much, or going too far, or giving up control. Instead, he is letting go by going with himself (all intently)—and that attitude makes all the difference.

I admit that it is somehow sometimes difficult to attain proper balance, so that you are not concentrating upon the problem exclusively again. Those early autumn sessions, and the late summer ones, are of help here to balance what we are doing now, for they remind Ruburt of the magical framework and its operation, and assure him that relaxation is one of the best methods that release Framework 2 and its creativity.