“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.

(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.

(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.

(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.]

(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.

(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.)