“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon while I was out doing errands, Jane had a rather strong if not lengthy experience that seemed to encompass an emotional understanding of Seth’s material in the last session [for Monday]. She’s already reread that session three times, and so have I. This time she got the emotional content of it, though, and scribbled a few lines while it lasted, perhaps 10 minutes. Tears were involved, or nearly so. She was coming out of it as I came back into the house. As we talked about it, each from a somewhat different angle, Jane ended up saying the experience seemed pretty “prosaic” after all in retrospect—yet at the time it had been pretty powerful.

(Both of us have been curious as to how the material in Monday night’s session fits in with that on the Sinful Self, which Jane still hasn’t typed except for the first five pages. I’m somewhat handicapped because I don’t have the Sinful Self material to compare anything to, but I’m sure there are many connections between the two. I’d planned to write down some questions for tonight, based on Monday’s session, but had so many actually that I decided to let that project go, trusting that Seth will cover them in his own way.

(One of the questions concerned Seth’s material on page 218 of the last session, when he referred to the feeling that Jane and I have, that we had “an even more unfair advantage” without children—this, as he’d stated earlier, on top of our already being set apart from others because of our creative gifts. “It’s like you’ve got to atone for being “better” or different than others, according to that kind of thinking,” I said at 8:10. “It’s the sort of thing I think is rooted in Sinful-Self stuff, on both of our parts—you’re not going to feel guilty about the gifts of nature unless those feelings have a pretty strong base in the psyche, somewhere.... Why can’t we feel glad about being gifted instead?” I added that as I’d said this afternoon, guilt about superiority would make a lot of gifted people miserable if they paid attention to such thinking. And I’m afraid that history contains numerous examples wherein that very reaction has taken place. I realize that the very handicaps adopted could also be part of the given personality’s overall plan for life—contending with that as well as the gifts.

(Tonight as we waited for the session to begin I showed Jane my three recent dreams that I was interested in having Seth comment upon: July 7 [Sayre], 17 [reincarnation and Debbie Janney], and 19 [Jane recovering overnight]. Jane looked them over again, although she’d read them this afternoon. I’ve started a small oil painting based on the “chute” portion of the dream for July 7. I’ve also done a pencil sketch of one of the heads in the photos of myself in the reincarnational dream of July 17, in case I don’t get to paint it.

(“All right,” Jane finally said as she took off her glasses and began speaking for Seth with many long pauses:)

Ruburt took on the bargain later, where the symptoms could be used as a backup system, preventing him from going out and working, so adjustments were made along the way. Later they prevented TV tours and so forth, keeping you both oriented at your joint works. This is apart from Ruburt’s worries about revelatory material. The entire framework is indeed based upon a distorted idea of the nature of true responsibility.

(Long pause.) I do not want you to concentrate upon the situation any more, certainly, than you are doing, however. The idea is to keep the material as much as you can at a conscious level, then more or less drop it before picking it up again—without the steady bombardment. I mention this periodically. The idea of identifying with your pleasure, identifying yourselves with your pleasurable feelings and emotions, is highly vital. Small changes in your lives or habits can also be extremely helpful, because small as they are they break down habitual habits.

Making a portion of the nighttime hours available in one way or another at least occasionally is also another way of breaking up habitual reactions, and of assuring a certain kind of privacy, using a completely different method entirely. Again, the material on responsibility is important to your understanding.

Ruburt’s insights this afternoon are quite legitimate. Your notes were a way of presenting the material. The symptoms were a way of presenting the material. That is the connection Ruburt was trying to make. This will be a relatively brief session, and again other psychological events connect the session material with your private experience as you make certain translations that are necessary quite for yourselves.

(9:13 PM. Jane knew it had been a shorter session. Seth had confirmed her reincarnational insight into my dream of July 17, but hadn’t given much data. Nor did I ask him to. Note that originally Seth didn’t mention the reincarnational connections in his interpretation of the dream. I do think Jane is still somewhat reluctant to deal with reincarnation. There could, of course, be almost endless questions about such reincarnational dream clues. Interesting, though.