“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 8:20 PM Jane called and asked whether she should have a session—she couldn’t make up her mind. I said I wanted more material on responsibility, that I wanted Seth to discuss it so it would help free her. “So I should have the session because it’s my responsibility to do it,” she said. “No,” I answered, “but it would be nice to have it in order to learn that your only responsibility is to get rid of the idea of responsibility. That’s all I care about.”

(Jane has felt somewhat better the last couple of days, and I’ve been hoping that what we’re learning is “responsible” for that improvement. I told her as we waited for the session that I was all for more material on the responsibility question, for I see it as the key to setting her free. I said also that her decision to give up doing publicity, made just recently, might be helping her feel better.

(“I guess I’m confused,” Jane said at 8:55. “I feel responsible to get more on responsibility, I guess, where this afternoon I thought I’d like him to finish that chapter in his book and get started on another one. Then you came out and said you’d like more on responsibility, so....” I explained that my idea was only to get more material on what Seth had begun yesterday—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do material on other things too.

(At 9 PM I was thinking of telling Jane to forget the session when she remarked, “I almost feel him around.” I don’t think we’ve ever “abandoned” a session once we sat for it, but was willing to do it if need be. Then:)

Generally speaking, large segments of your official society do not regard the pursuit of art as responsible behavior.

(10:05 PM. “I got something at the tail end of the session that he didn’t say,” Jane told me. “I don’t know whether it was right or not—it involved you. I don’t know if you’ll agree: You can check with the pendulum. The idea of the trouble you gave yourself with the rib was connected with the guys coming to work here, to give you an excuse to do your thing and be isolated so they wouldn’t ask you to help, or strain yourself physically because you were already hurt. I got it at the very end. I don’t know why he didn’t say that. I waited to see if he was going to give it, and when he didn’t, I did.”

(Note that Seth didn’t continue with his material on the mail, which he began in answer to my question on July 26. I also forgot to ask him to. In that last session I meant to add the thought that we may have to dispense with answering much of the mail. I’ll gladly do this if I discover that it is behind any large-sized hassle Jane may be carrying around about public responsibility. The mail would have to go, at least until she’d resolved such an issue. It serves as a constant reminder of what many people regard as her responsibility, and could be more of an impediment or irritant than I had suspected, I told her the other day. People read the books, get something out of them—then want personal help that Jane can’t give in any meaningful, long-term way. She’s been very rigorous in answering the mail for a number of years, and my thought at the moment at least is that it—the mail—might be more of a time bomb than we realized in that respect.

(I would like to add that I found the session to be excellent as usual, but also found some of the material sad and depressing: It looked like we had a lot of wasted years involved in negative thinking, and that we were now struggling to get out of or rid of. At the moment I couldn’t decide if everyone had such hassles in life, or if Jane and I had managed to create sets of beliefs that were indeed “beauts” and quite unusual. I was afraid our beliefs ruled our lives so completely, were so pervasive, that we’d never get out of their mazes. As I asked Paul O’Neill last month: “How do you be objective about something when you’re inside of it?”)