“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane didn’t particularly look like she wanted to hold a session, though, and said she felt some resistance to the idea. I went into the writing room to do some filing. Eventually she called me, saying she would have the session. When I went back into the living room I told her that we must be doing something wrong, or that we’d have achieved much better results over the years regarding her symptoms. “I think it’s something we’re blind to, that’s right in front of us all the time, but we can’t see it,” I said. I reminded her of the stories one hears about the chronically ill, who run from doctor to doctor with no intention of getting well, because their illness serves purposes in the present. “Something like that,” I said. “I never could believe that the first few years of a person’s life could have that much of an effect upon the rest of the person’s life. It doesn’t seem right, or natural, that an individual might have to spend say fifty years suffering in life for things that happened to him when he was a child, say; I don’t think nature would arrange things that way—it’s too self-defeating....” These are points we’ve discussed before, of course.

Even before our sessions began, you both knew that generally speaking, now, you were quite different from other people, highly gifted creatively and intellectually. You suspected that you were not as “mired” (long pause) as other people were, and also that in some fashion you were not as committed to usual (underlined) physical experience. You felt sometimes as if you wanted to spy upon life, observe it rather than live it directly. This was not because you were afraid of life (as I often wondered when I was younger), but because your purposes and intents were different.

(Long pause.) Your purposes meant that you required a certain amount of isolation from the world—so any handicap that was accepted would also be one that fit into those other purposes.

(Long pause.)In a way, to a degree—the qualifications are necessary—you provided yourselves an extra kind of commitment that would keep your observations of life from becoming too surface, or so it seemed. When your parents were alive, their problems could be used somewhat in a second-handed fashion for the same purposes. Before that, jobs for both of you served to make you rub elbows, so to speak, with others, and to equalize your paths and theirs. As you became better off financially you felt the need again for that kind of equalization, or handicap.