“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.