“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

(I might add that Seth’s capsule commentary on the reasons for her symptoms is just what I wanted, and that we ought to keep copies of it available for easy reference. The thought came to me after supper that Jane’s doing the ESP classes probably contributed to the symptoms over the years, since the class situation was one in which she advanced her unconventional ideas to the public. I haven’t had a chance to discuss this with her, but it seems possible that her disseminating her ideas to a large number of people, in person each week, could have struck her deep-seated need for protection.... If Jane reads this material before holding a session tonight, perhaps Seth can comment.)