“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

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.

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.

(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.

(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.)