“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This noon after lunch, then—on the 4th—Jane and I had a discussion about the ideas mentioned above. My latest efforts to cope with our challenges involve her letting go of Seth’s latest books. Dreams, for some time. That is, we can work on it if we want to, but with no thought of deadlines or signing a contract, which would commit Jane to additional public exposure. The idea is that she’ll be free to do what she wants with the Seth material, for as long as she wants to, without our adding fuel to her fears until we’ve had a chance to work things through. I told her I was sure I was on the right track here, without knowing positively that I was, and without having pat answers that would solve all of our hassles.

(Putting off Dreams, it seemed to me, was a necessity at the moment because I now believed that the long interlude in her dictation was, again, a clear sign of resistance to the project on Jane’s part. The idea is an attempt to at least call a halt to something that she has resisted from the start, or so it seems in retrospect—and I mean the start of the sessions, not just Dreams. I reminded her that I was the one who first suggested we start publishing the Seth material, and that she’d had reservations about doing that. It seemed to me now that a clear course of hanging back had been displayed by Jane all though our psychic endeavors, and that it could be easily charted if we took the time to do so. I said that she would have probably used her psychic gifts in some fashion in her writing, but that the Seth books might very well have not come into existence except for my own interest—hence my mental insight this morning that Jane did the Seth books to please me. I know things aren’t that simple, but I do feel that the fact of public exposure represented by the Seth books has always bothered Jane. And currently she has been bothered more than ever, as she has described in her December 27, 1980 paper. This upset includes her work on her own latest, The God of Jane.

(I explained that in their different ways both Jane’s ESP classes, and the mail, reflect other aspects of public exposure, and that these too must have engendered resistance over the years. [Jane remarked last week to the effect that she wondered how she could get out of answering the mail, for example.] Class had always seemed to offer much, and has helped many people, yet implicit in its very existence was the fact of public exposure concerning unacceptable psychic abilities, in Jane’s eyes, I told her. My idea is that both class and mail have had an unfortunate reinforcing effect over the years as far as the symptoms and their attendant fears go.

(Even today’s mail, which we read after finishing our discussion, contained several beautiful examples of points I’ve described above. This brought up another matter—our being confronted with the work we have published, as well as by Mass Events and God of Jane. No way to get away from those fifteen books of the past, I said, so to that extent we have to live with the results they engender. I too wondered about dispensing with answering the mail, while being very reluctant to do so, since many of the letters are openly laudatory, and we save them for reference [although we haven’t actually used any for such purposes]. But therein lies trouble, too, I said, because they would reflect Jane’s concern about public exposure, her fears about leading people astray.