“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.

(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.

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.

(We did take Tom’s address and phone number, Jane telling him that she might invite him and friends to the house some Friday night, with others. I explained to her in the bedroom that part of my initial resistance to Tom staying so long was my desire to start typing this session, which I consider very useful.

(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.)