“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.

(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.

—They were simply brushed up and renewed. They represented a kind of psychological handicap. The situation also helped serve to explain, you felt particularly in the beginning, oddities of your own behaviors in regard to society. When you gave up your job you did not have to explain why you did not have to find another as “any normal red-blooded male should do,” but stayed at home devoted to a time of painting and philosophy. You also had a wife to look after who had physical difficulties.

If you wanted to monitor the number of people who came to the house, or the publicity involved, the symptoms provided a built-in framework. If you wanted deeply wrought psychological statements, the symptoms also provided a framework around which they could occur—an inner framework of personal sessions devoted to the workings of personality, an inner library beside the books themselves, that perhaps you would not otherwise think of without such an impetus.