“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.

(“So you’re in trouble,” I said, “because that situation makes the Seth material legitimate. How could you possibly understand people’s troubles unless you had pretty severe ones yourself—with my cooperation? No one can ever accuse you of handing down great insights from a position of being above it all.... You can say, ‘Look, folks. I have my hassles too.’”

(Obviously, many facets of these ideas have been discussed many times. There was something new here, though, I thought, when one postulated that Seth as we knew him was acceptable because of the symptoms. Acceptable and accessible. Dealing with our personal situations was taking up more and more of our time. Strange, I thought, if it turned out that personal work would be one of the most creative of all the uses to which the Seth material could be put, rather than grandiose pronouncements coming down from on high, dispensed by one who was in a position of superiority.

(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.

(Very slowly:) For a while you (underlined) considered the possibility of adopting a “handicap,” such as one might in sports. You tried the role on for size, deciding finally that you could not accept it (my back trouble at 458, etc.).

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.) Your purposes meant that you required a certain amount of isolation from the world—so any handicap that was accepted would also be one that fit into those other purposes.

(10:12.) Now: Ruburt’s hearing is not impeded (long pause), meaning that he is not losing his hearing. That condition was also related to the telephone one, adding the extra difficulty of clearly hearing a television—or rather radio—program, and the hearing difficulty was aggravated along with the hands.

Both of you—to some extent, now, following this evening’s discussion —felt that with two books and perhaps even the poetry book coming out in one year, people would think it was easy enough for you to write your pronouncements from the hilltop, even though in those books you made certain that you mentioned any and all difficulties that came your way, collected your stories of hassles with scientists or publishers, and so forth.

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.

(10:30 PM. Jane had done well. I was encouraged that Seth too found something to talk about in my insight of just before the session. Later, I supposed that Jane’s recovery—even if only to a degree—could also be taken as a sign of the legitimacy of the Seth material, since she’d be using it to see her way clear to bring about that recovery. That’s the way I for one would like to see things work out.

(“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.)