“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.

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).

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.

It is no coincidence that you examine the nature of our books or your notes on the one hand, and Ruburt’s symptoms on the other.