“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane now spends much time afraid that she won’t be able to manipulate in the john, so it seems that now is the time to go on to other modes of help than our own and Seth’s, I said—unless these last few sessions can help, unless they can add an understanding and/or stimulus that will bring her some relief. I’m quite distraught and beside myself, personally, and so is she. “What’s the matter,” I asked her after supper tonight, “do you feel guilty because you think you deserted your mother?” I explained that I felt self-punishment, a feeling of unworthiness, self-doubt and mistrust must lie at the root of her symptoms—that she felt she must pay a price for each success, like the publishing of a book. Why else would a person put up with what she has for well over a decade, without asking others for help? Incredible, I said, and added that I must have contributed mightily to her behavior. What has happened to my lovely wife, I wondered, sitting beside her on the couch as we ate supper of bacon and waffles? What could possibly be so bad in life that we had to pay such a price?

(Jim Adams also called just before supper, and I relayed the substance of his call to Jane. Last week he’d said himself that Jane’s eyes were good, that she had no eye disease, or glaucoma, etc. —worries Jane has fretted over for years. Jim agreed with us—and Seth, incidentally—that Jane’s trouble with double vision was muscular in nature. He decided against using prisms to unify her visions because of frequent problems people had with nausea, etc. Instead he measured her for new reading glasses, and these alone evoked an enthusiastic response from Jane, since she could see to read much better with the test lenses.

All of the material I have given about attitudes toward revelationary material are important in that context, and please realize that I am categorizing. To that degree and in the light of this discussion, you end up with what I will call —and have in the past called—the overly conscientious self, which attempts to deal with the attitudes of the Sinful Self by checking and double-checking all the time, by being, in other words, overly conscientious: is Ruburt dealing with “the truth,” and so forth? That kind of question is endlessly considered by the conscientious self. You are taught as children to be honest in very literal terms, and often children’s natural imaginative abilities and creativity get them in a good deal of trouble.