“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(See the enclosed four pages Jane wrote covering her activities for the last weekend. Although she says it’s incomplete, it still summarizes her activities better than I can do second-handedly. I can add to Jane’s paper that we went over last Friday’s session together Saturday night after I’d finished typing it, and discussed a number of points rather specifically. Jane ended up somewhat upset, and so did I in a way. But also that discussion resulted in some later insights on Jane’s part, and I believe turned up in some of her poetry, which has been excellent lately.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

Now: I will answer your questions this evening—but rather than begin with them I would like to make some general comments about your own observation immediately before the session, and in a fairly neutral manner.

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.

These involved large vital issues regarding the nature of suffering. Neither of you had been vitally (underlined) touched by war. You experienced certain portions of it. You have that in common with your generation, but you had not been severely injured, or even—if the truth had been known—severely put out. Ruburt had been touched hardly at all. You were not to share the experience of violence.

—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.

(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.