“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.

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.

The usual framework of married life with children was not to be a part of your experience this time, and both of you took pains to see that you did not have children—or mates that wanted them. To some extent you both felt guilty that a certain kind of clear knowledge seemed so naturally and clearly available. Your own physical attributes and sports proficiency saw that kind of extension physically translated. To a lesser degree, Ruburt’s agility, his performance as a dancer and so forth, gave him the feeling that even physical achievements carried an ease that many did not possess. You did not feel, however, as if you particularly related well with other people, and as you grew older it seemed that any changes would have to come from you (not others.

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).

Ruburt received certain kinds of knowledge by taking various jobs throughout his early adulthood, including factory work or whatever. That knowledge was used in all of his writing. On a certain level he took those jobs because he needed money, not because he needed experience in other lines of work or with other kinds of people. When he sold Avon he was hearing the questions that his own work would later try to answer. He could not have faked pretending to need the jobs, or it would not have worked, so neither of you could pretend to have physical difficulties so that you could, for example, put yourselves in other peoples’ shoes.

(Long pause.) Your purposes meant that you required a certain amount of isolation from the world—so any handicap that was accepted would also be one that fit into those other purposes.

(10:12.) Now: Ruburt’s hearing is not impeded (long pause), meaning that he is not losing his hearing. That condition was also related to the telephone one, adding the extra difficulty of clearly hearing a television—or rather radio—program, and the hearing difficulty was aggravated along with the hands.

Both of you—to some extent, now, following this evening’s discussion —felt that with two books and perhaps even the poetry book coming out in one year, people would think it was easy enough for you to write your pronouncements from the hilltop, even though in those books you made certain that you mentioned any and all difficulties that came your way, collected your stories of hassles with scientists or publishers, and so forth.

(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 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.

(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.

(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.

(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.)