“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

DELETED SESSION

(We almost didn’t have the session. An unexpected visitor arrived at about 8 PM—Walter from Connecticut—and Jane talked to him for at least half an hour. Then she did the dishes, and so forth. All this time she was so uncomfortable in her chair that I thought she’d pass up the session, although I’d been hoping she’d get at least a little something on herself; I thought we shouldn’t be losing any chances to do so at this time.

(Finally she called me for the session at 9:40 PM. Again she struggled to get comfortable, just as she’d done for last Wednesday night’s session. Walter is a nice young man. I went back to working on taxes while Jane talked to him, and at the same time found myself wondering whether his unexpected visit might symbolize one of the very facets of Jane’s dilemma about privacy versus the public life—at least as I understand it: Her vulnerability and availability to anyone who chooses to come here. We can’t get away. Others must know this, by whatever means, and may take advantage of her immobility. Walter, for example, told us that when he woke up this morning he decided to go see Jane Roberts—so he just came. [This was his second visit, the first being a couple of years ago.]

(Jane had remarked the other day that she thought Seth would talk about her reaction to class and the mail—topics discussed in the opening notes for the last session. I was also still thinking about her reaction to the sessions themselves: the idea that she could feel inferior to Seth and/or the material was, as I noted, a pretty new one for me, and somewhat surprising. Yet Jane had said recently that such thoughts had come to her. See page 289 of the last session. I noted there that I didn’t recall her telling me about such feelings.

(She’d spent considerable time today looking over her 1973 notebook/journal, and combining new notes with fresh insights arising from that old material. We went over it together; she is to type it together before long, when it will be added to a session.

The trouble is that he tries to live up to an idealized image. That image in a way is a potpourri, picked up from his readers, even other books, the culture in general. He thinks that ideally he should want to be a public person, to give and enjoy giving interviews to the press or television, that he should (underlined) carry our message out into the world, have sessions on television so that people can see how I operate (with amused emphasis). If he were not frightened, it seems to him that is what he would and should do.

(Long pause.) He felt that he was supposed to be a different kind of person than he is. We will deal with some of this under the heading of responsibility later. In all probability, however, someone who was that publicly attuned would not be able to have our own kind of sessions to begin with, for the mixture of abilities would be of a different sort.

End of session, and I bid you a fond good evening. He should feel quite a bit better shortly.

(11:02 PM. “I remember some—not much,” Jane said. And once again, I told her, she had given an excellent session.