“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.

(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.

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.

(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.)