“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.

(I began to get a fresh insight to the symptom situation as we talked, hardly realizing that I was doing so. “It’s just that the symptoms show that you’re a human being like everyone else,” I speculated. “They show that you’re not ensconced on high, telling everyone else what to do through Seth, telling them how to handle all of their problems while you live a life of wealth, talent, and happiness, free of all worldly cares and responsibilities,” I added.

(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.

(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.

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.

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.

(Long pause.) The feet are connected with the overall situation itself. In that they want greater activity and circulation. More exercising of the feet will be of benefit. On a physical level alone the heat is also somewhat connected. You used this period, however, yourselves, as a time to critically aggravate the symptoms (long pause), almost as if you were looking over a body of work to see what you thought of it, and what you wanted to do next.

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.