“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

DELETED SESSION

(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.

(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.

(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.

Now: I will answer your questions this evening—but rather than begin with them I would like to make some general comments about your own observation immediately before the session, and in a fairly neutral manner.

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.

Ruburt picked up the idea instead, and toyed with it. When the sessions started you were both amazed at the ease with which the material was received, struck by its quality, aware at certain levels of its challenge. Ruburt was astonished, and became more so at the spontaneous nature of his own and my creativity. (Long pause.) There were certain deep questions about life, certain pressing problems about man’s condition, with which you felt you had little experience, since your primary goals had been to examine life, to stand apart from it to study it, And therefore you both felt that you had few of the same concerns as those that led other people (quietly intent).

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.

(10:23.) End of session.

End of session.

(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.

(A note added Wednesday evening, as I finish typing the session:

(A situation developed Tuesday evening—last night—as I planned to begin typing this session. The event reinforced much of the material in the session itself, and my idea that had brought it about: As Jane and I were finishing supper last night Tom D’Orio from Binghamton visited us with two of his friends [they had a small Seth group going at home]. Tom is an “old” ESP class member. Jane evidently enjoyed talking to the three of them, and before we knew it over an hour had passed, whereas I’d originally asked Tom and company not to stay long because we were busy. It was around 9 PM when they finally left, and although I was getting tired I stuck to it and typed the first two pages of notes for this session while I kept in mind what I wanted to put down. Jane then read them and agreed with them.

(As we made ready for bed at the usual time, Jane said she “wanted to talk.” She revealed that she’d thought of having a session for the three visitors. This surprised me. [She’d also thought of having a session before their arrival, so that Seth could continue the material he’d started Monday; she hadn’t told me this.]

(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.

(“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.

(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.