“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.

(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.

(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.

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.

The usual framework of married life with children was not to be a part of your experience this time, and both of you took pains to see that you did not have children—or mates that wanted them. To some extent you both felt guilty that a certain kind of clear knowledge seemed so naturally and clearly available. Your own physical attributes and sports proficiency saw that kind of extension physically translated. To a lesser degree, Ruburt’s agility, his performance as a dancer and so forth, gave him the feeling that even physical achievements carried an ease that many did not possess. You did not feel, however, as if you particularly related well with other people, and as you grew older it seemed that any changes would have to come from you (not others.

Ruburt picked up the idea instead, and toyed with it. When the sessions started you were both amazed at the ease with which the material was received, struck by its quality, aware at certain levels of its challenge. Ruburt was astonished, and became more so at the spontaneous nature of his own and my creativity. (Long pause.) There were certain deep questions about life, certain pressing problems about man’s condition, with which you felt you had little experience, since your primary goals had been to examine life, to stand apart from it to study it, And therefore you both felt that you had few of the same concerns as those that led other people (quietly intent).

You did not have the family concerns of children, as Ruburt mentioned. Without such concerns, you began to feel that you had an even more unfair advantage. (Long pause.) In the meantime, all of the issues we have mentioned as being connected with Ruburt’s symptoms of course were present to one extent or another, in abeyance. You wanted to ask the kind of questions that were important to other people, beside questions of your own, because the meaning of life itself lay also in other areas than your own. You also wanted a bridge and protective coloration.

(9:51.) Yet, so it seemed to you, one of you would have to make such an effort. You needed extra impetus—again so it seemed—lest your relative nonattachment to life’s conditions kept you from a sympathetic understanding of your fellow man.

(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.

(“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.

(I added another thought—that often lately I’ve reminded myself that I’m 10 years older than she is; at 62 I’ve managed during the last decade to say “the hell with it” to a lot of things that I used to pay a lot of attention to when I was 52, Jane’s present age. I’d had that extra time to work some things out. Jane said she knew this. It seems that in recent years one of my main goals in life has been to pare down—or eliminate outright—a number of ideas and obligations and hassles that I’d finally realized weren’t worth the time to retain. Each time I manage to dispense of something that way, I regard it as an achievement. Now, I told her, I want to spend my time on the few things I consider important in life.)