“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(She was indeed very relaxed, sitting as she was with her head bowed, leaning forward on the couch. Leonard Yaudes had just left. Today Jane had worked a little on page 6 of her “Manifesto from the Sinful Self”—a long dissertation from that entity that she’d started to get yesterday afternoon. [She’d slept ‘till noon.] The material had begun to flow quite effortlessly because of her concern over what I’d written in my notes for Monday’s session, about her being unable to take care of herself physically any longer. As soon as she’d read that passage on Tuesday, she’d begun to talk about it, to question me, so I knew it had struck a sticky point.

(I hadn’t deliberately planned that those notes would do that, yet in retrospect I was glad they had—especially in the unprecedented response Jane was getting from her Sinful Self. Her paper was very well done, and would make fascinating material in an autobiography, for instance. The Sinful Self’s material is too long and complicated to describe here, except to say that it contains the Sinful Self’s own view of reality and its relationship to Jane’s background and work, it’s regrets, its defensive attitudes, its questions, and its genuine puzzlement that man has for so long —perhaps for most of history, indeed—persisted in the creation of and reliance upon such entities as the Sinful Self.

(Nor was Jane finished with her dissertation. A unique situation. I told her, feeling that only good could come out of such a dialogue between parts of the overall self or personality. It will be very interesting to see the results. I wondered how often such a clear-cut dialogue or exchange was on record as having taken place between such various portions of the self. A search of the psychological literature would be very interesting.

(I told Jane at 8:39 that I didn’t know whether or not Seth was through with his Prentice-Hall material, and she said that we’d gotten to the heart of it. In answer to my question about material in the last session, she said that yes, she still felt to some degree that she had to protect her work from me and my feelings about Prentice-Hall. She continued that she felt that my feelings about Prentice-Hall had influenced my own feelings about Mass Events, and so they have. She then said that she also thought my feelings about Prentice-Hall had influenced my feelings about Seth’s next book more than my feelings about her did.

(“You’ve got it backwards.” I said. I said that I reacted much more deeply to my feelings about her than any I have about Prentice-Hall; I was much more concerned about her own condition. “Prentice-Hall is a faceless entity out there that we come into contact with once in a while,” I said, “but I see and live with you every day. Your situation is much more important to me than anything Prentice may do or not do.”)

It is important that its questions and attitudes be taken seriously. Ruburt’s forgotten dream was a clear psychological statement in which all of the elements in his personality momentarily joined not only for a discussion, so to speak, but blended their forces, exerted their energies, and set up a firm intent to clarify the entire situation, and to exert all of their energies in a successful healing venture.

Then there are quite necessary resting periods in between, in which theoretically (underlined) the matters would be best dropped from conscious concentration. Such a period is then followed again by perhaps more pointed activity. It is necessary that assimilation take place, of course. It is also necessary that there is room for certain psychological actions and motions to change from one pattern to another. The message of the Sinful Self shows excellent psychological mobility. (Pause.) That material can quite legitimately “take the place of” a regular session for the week. It was of great value in the fact that the Sinful Self was able, finally, to express itself that clearly—and I do not believe that the document is as yet completed.

The main issues with which the Sinful Self was concerned were focused most clearly in Mass Events and God of Jane, since more than the other books they represent a direct confrontation “attacking” the very legitimacy of the entire concept of sin and evil, insisting more dramatically on the good intent of man’s basic impulses.

(“No. I guess not,” I said after some thought. I finally decided Jane wanted the rest, since she/Seth was calling for a short session.)