“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane has had some interesting nighttime experiences in connection with the hostages, and has written the brief note attached to the session. She hasn’t been able to really explain them yet; perhaps Seth will comment. My own guess is that she’s touched upon some probable events.

(Jane said she felt Seth around by 9:20, but that she thought the session would be a short one. I told her I was primarily interested in but two things, both personal: her reactions to Mass Events and God of Jane in connection with her symptoms, and what was going on in her backside and hips. She hasn’t “walked” for weeks now—since last year—and the hip problems especially have persisted now for a number of months. I wanted to hear from Seth something about why her body was taking so long to respond in those areas.

I do not want to oversimplify, but it is as if each generation or group of generations seeks it own overall themes, about which the world will be organized. Those will appear in the private lives of citizens and in private dreams and in national events, or global ones, so that both arenas of activity are always intimately involved.

You knew ahead of time the kind of world you would be entering. The challenges that you and Ruburt both accepted have been discussed often, and to some extent they mirrored the challenges of the world at large. It is only of late, relatively speaking, that some of those issues have begun to rather clearly show themselves in the arena of public events, however.

Ruburt found it very difficult to take a public stand, as separate from, say, a private one. My book and his—that is, Mass Events and God of Jane—both do take public stands. They comment clearly on issues that affect individual and private, and national or community behavior. The importance of impulses was stressed in particular, and the acceptance of such an idea is important to Ruburt’s recovery, of course—but also vital in the behavior of nations.

It may seem that nations behave only too impulsively, that for example the just-released American hostages were kidnapped as a result of highly impulsive behavior. In fact, that event might only seem to prove that impulsive behavior is basically aggressive, undependable, and chaotic. As a matter of fact, the students took such regrettable actions not because they gave into impulsive behavior, but because the road to true impulsive expression had been blocked so long that such actions became one of the few possible ways of giving vent to certain expressions. When you are a hostage you cannot express your own impulses, of course. Your free will is highly curtailed for all practical purposes. It is curtailed because the number of impulses are so drastically reduced by circumstance.

Whenever, and for whatever reasons you block the normally free flow of impulses, you also curtail the exercise of free will, for free will involves you in the experience of choosing between the actualization of one impulse or another. The captors then cut down on the freedom of the hostages by reducing the number of impulses to which the hostages could respond. This is all so clear that it is difficult to express step by step. The telling itself makes the affair seem complex—but whether or not you are dealing with private behavior, with the treatment of one person in regard to his or her own impulses, or whether you are dealing with a mass event of political nature, involving the enforced blockage of impulses on the part of one group toward another, you are necessarily cutting down on the exercise of free will.

The information in Mass Events and in our sessions helped him use impulses to a far better degree than he had before, and helped him keep some balance, let him advance in understanding despite the period of difficulty. Still at various times and throughout the period, he used what he thought of as that additional protection: the symptoms kept him inside, where it seemed he could indeed express himself with the least duress. At the same time he was learning that expression denied at one level means expression denied to some extent at all levels (louder)—so that of course his creative work also suffered to some degree.