“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 8:30 I asked Jane what her plans for the evening were. She said she’d have a session, after I explained that I was interested in Seth giving some information on her hearing, swollen feet, and what seemed to be some reactions she was having to our use of the DMSO. We’ve more or less decided to forgo the use of the drug temporarily because of those reactions, which aren’t serious but which leave her feeling somewhat disoriented, with a strange feeling in her stomach, and lower back discomfort.

(I began to get a fresh insight to the symptom situation as we talked, hardly realizing that I was doing so. “It’s just that the symptoms show that you’re a human being like everyone else,” I speculated. “They show that you’re not ensconced on high, telling everyone else what to do through Seth, telling them how to handle all of their problems while you live a life of wealth, talent, and happiness, free of all worldly cares and responsibilities,” I added.

(“So you’re in trouble,” I said, “because that situation makes the Seth material legitimate. How could you possibly understand people’s troubles unless you had pretty severe ones yourself—with my cooperation? No one can ever accuse you of handing down great insights from a position of being above it all.... You can say, ‘Look, folks. I have my hassles too.’”

(Obviously, many facets of these ideas have been discussed many times. There was something new here, though, I thought, when one postulated that Seth as we knew him was acceptable because of the symptoms. Acceptable and accessible. Dealing with our personal situations was taking up more and more of our time. Strange, I thought, if it turned out that personal work would be one of the most creative of all the uses to which the Seth material could be put, rather than grandiose pronouncements coming down from on high, dispensed by one who was in a position of superiority.

(Jane surprised me after I said most of what I had to say by adding that she thought our attitudes about children also had something to do with the symptoms —a connection that I could say had never occurred to me. It seemed like a strange idea to me, but I didn’t have time to think about it at the moment. I didn’t have time to really think about what I’d been saying myself, but I hoped there was something to it, and that discussing it would offer her some help in the form of improved health. For some time now I’d thought, often, that it could be that she wanted to be sick —that that was the role she’d chosen for this life, that in many ways all of our efforts to get out from under the symptoms were really beside the point. My latest insight, that the symptoms offered legitimacy to the Seth material, was, I hoped, itself legitimate.

(Jane said she thought Seth might discuss our discussion, as well as the three other questions I’d mentioned about her feet, and so forth. I also had questions about some of my recent dreams, including the one of July 7 that Seth had promised to comment upon, but I had little hope that he’d get into that material tonight.

(Long pause.) All of the ideas of the Sinful Self had been in abeyance—(10:00. The telephone rang, and at Seth’s urging I answered it. Margaret Bumbalo told me she and her husband were going up to their cottage on the lake; they asked that I take in their mail.)

(10:30 PM. Jane had done well. I was encouraged that Seth too found something to talk about in my insight of just before the session. Later, I supposed that Jane’s recovery—even if only to a degree—could also be taken as a sign of the legitimacy of the Seth material, since she’d be using it to see her way clear to bring about that recovery. That’s the way I for one would like to see things work out.

(A situation developed Tuesday evening—last night—as I planned to begin typing this session. The event reinforced much of the material in the session itself, and my idea that had brought it about: As Jane and I were finishing supper last night Tom D’Orio from Binghamton visited us with two of his friends [they had a small Seth group going at home]. Tom is an “old” ESP class member. Jane evidently enjoyed talking to the three of them, and before we knew it over an hour had passed, whereas I’d originally asked Tom and company not to stay long because we were busy. It was around 9 PM when they finally left, and although I was getting tired I stuck to it and typed the first two pages of notes for this session while I kept in mind what I wanted to put down. Jane then read them and agreed with them.

(As we made ready for bed at the usual time, Jane said she “wanted to talk.” She revealed that she’d thought of having a session for the three visitors. This surprised me. [She’d also thought of having a session before their arrival, so that Seth could continue the material he’d started Monday; she hadn’t told me this.]

(So it seems that we do use the symptoms to serve our own ends, according to our current beliefs. Yet now there’s been a change, or at least a thought about a change: “But I don’t think having a spontaneous session would be all that bad,” she said, “if by being spontaneous I got set free.” Indeed. In the immediate past I would have automatically been against—or at least not in favor of—such a session for relative strangers on short notice. I would have been tonight, also, had I even thought of it—that is, I would have negated such a performance until I had the chance to study the implications of my reactions, in the light of my insight of Monday night, and Seth’s excellent session following that insight.

(“Now, I wouldn’t care if you walked on the ceiling, if it did any good,” I said. We talked about the fun we used to have on Friday nights at 458, years ago, when the sessions had just gotten underway, and Jane often spontaneously let Seth come through. Those times had had an innocence that we’d lost along the way. [Earlier Monday night, before the session, I’d asked Jane how one could “be a child again,” while retaining the valuable elements from the subsequent events in life, but keeping that original clarity and simplicity of vision.] I’d been thinking primarily of painting.