“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Now that idea, I thought as I went into the kitchen to get Jane some wine for the session, made sense—it could account for the perpetuation of her symptoms on a daily, present-life basis, and made a lot more sense than thinking she was suffering now because of something that happened to her when she was perhaps eight years old or whatever. In other words, I said, we’d been approaching the problem backwards: Jane wasn’t sick so much because of her past as she was because of what we were doing every day in present reality—reinforcing and/or perpetuating the symptoms because they served a number of beliefs about present-day reality. I included myself in these speculations, of course. I thought I was onto something from a fresh viewpoint, and at the same time was afraid that we’d heard it all before and that the idea meant little. It was also difficult to visualize clearly enough so that it was not merely a repetition of old ideas, but a new slant on those old ideas.

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.

(Jane said that the reasons she didn’t have a session for Tom and friends were that her own feelings were against her doing so even though she’d had the spontaneous urge, and that she was also tired because of her symptoms and sitting on the couch for so long. She also was afraid I’d get mad if she did such a thing. She very accurately pointed out that she’d used the symptoms, then, to keep the gathering under control according to our everyday ideas. It had never occurred to me, for example, that she’d consider such a spontaneous session these days—nor had she for years. She said she was also afraid that she’d keep the group here at the house for hours if she let herself go and did what she wanted to do, on the spur of the moment.