“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As soon as I reread her paper the evening before last, I was reminded of the two excerpts I’d copied from recent deleted sessions—those for January 26 and 28, 1981. In them Seth briefly explained how Jane had created her symptoms as protection against the spontaneous self going too far: this fear was the real reason for the symptoms—not, as we usually thought, her fear that she would do other things besides work if she had normal mobility. The latter idea is a cover-up for the previous one. To Jane, going too far means that she would find herself in an unsafe position in the world. And to me, as I began to put all of this together, it meant that although she did the Seth books, which we think so highly of, she also drags her feet in resistance with each one—hence the long intervals of non-work that crop up during the production of each one. Again, without checking, I think that an examination of our records would show that her symptoms flared up, indeed worsened, as she worked on each Seth book, and that behind her labors on each book there lay this fear that she was going too far with each one she produced. This fear may be based on outmoded ideas—as Seth has mentioned at various times—it may make no sense, or whatever, yet as long as it exists it must be dealt with. This present session represents, then, our latest attempt to come to terms with all of our personal, public, and creative aspects involved with the Seth material—not just those we’d chosen to deal with in past years.

Now. Your social systems have very few frameworks that even take such experiences into consideration. (Pause.) There are the esoteric schools, for example, the spiritualistic societies, the Eastern traditions. Overall they involve a very small esoteric group. The mainspring of society becomes touched by such groups now and then—but in the world of, say, the usual public encounter there are no accepted frameworks for such experiences.

Ruburt and you live in a world with its own cultural taboos, its own assumptions. The idea of personhood is a highly vital one, uniting peoples and societies. The idea of personhood held by the Roman Catholic Church affected the history of the world for centuries, and that idea of personhood is intimately involved, of course, with the idea of personhood’s source.

Before even hearing the poetry no such audience, Ruburt felt, would question the fact of poetry itself—its techniques, traditions or value. My books, however, by their very existence appear in a world that largely does not concern itself with anything but the most surface elements of psychological reality. (Long pause.) The matter of duplicity almost immediately arises. Ruburt feels the existence of innumerable barriers in that regard—having, he feels, to fend with the questions that ensue.

(Pause.) I must be, as Seth, true or false, fiction or nonfiction, personality essence—spirit, if you prefer—or Ruburt’s own psyche in definitions usually accepted, playing at best a dubious role. And to a large degree those questions would be there even if our material quite agreed with the established knowledge of your world—but it does not. It contradicts much of the world’s knowledge.

If Ruburt wants to disagree with the world’s knowledge, he feels that it is his right—and again, would defend such ideas forthrightly. They would be based upon experiences that are his own—many that you have shared as a result of your own personal experiences together. But Ruburt is not aware of my subjective experience. My self-evident knowledge comes even if I were no more, again, than a part of his larger psyche, from reaches that would be inaccessible in those terms to him (all emphatically). That is, in those terms I would be delivering self-evident knowledge to him, revealing it (long pause), delivering it. I could not hand over the psychological quality of self-evident knowing, however. In that regard he does not have the same kind of inner experience with which to back up my words.

(Jane’s dream about Oswego reminded me of a little episode that I think of every so often, and that I’ve referred to in a note in one of the books, I think—probably Mass Events: When I’d asked her once years ago what she wanted to do more than anything else in life, she’d answered quickly, “Change the world.” Her conflict can be easily seen, then, manifesting between that idea and her deep-seated need for protection.