“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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 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.

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.

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.

(Jane said that the reasons she didn’t have a session for Tom and friends were that her own feelings were against her doing so even though she’d had the spontaneous urge, and that she was also tired because of her symptoms and sitting on the couch for so long. She also was afraid I’d get mad if she did such a thing. She very accurately pointed out that she’d used the symptoms, then, to keep the gathering under control according to our everyday ideas. It had never occurred to me, for example, that she’d consider such a spontaneous session these days—nor had she for years. She said she was also afraid that she’d keep the group here at the house for hours if she let herself go and did what she wanted to do, on the spur of the moment.

(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.