“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I had another of my “insights” while painting this morning, and talked it over with Jane after supper tonight. It was, simply, that we were wrong to blame imagined excesses of the spontaneous self for her problems—that really the trouble lay in her discovery that with the psychic abilities she was destined to find herself outside conventional creative authority: a person who learned that she would have to protect her very integrity as a person against charges of fraud. Publishers don’t put disclaimers on novels or poetry, I said. I added that Seth—and we—must have covered this ground many times over the years; yet now I felt that once again I was “on to something important.”

(The insight, such as it was, offered many clues to our present situation. I asked that Seth discuss it if she held a session tonight. Jane had been quite blue after sleeping for a couple of hours late this afternoon—and after she’d already slept for two hours this morning. It wasn’t that her psychic work, and the books, weren’t good, I said, or that they didn’t help people, but that they didn’t fit into the world as she saw it. Seth himself had referred to her dilemma in the excerpt I’ve taken from the private session for January 26, 1981, very well.

(No wonder, then, the retreat from the world, even the refusal to leave the house. Protection from the world must be had at all costs, even while she, with my help, persisted in using her abilities to some extent at least through the books. I wondered how much about all of this she’d never let Seth say. No wonder we sought privacy more and more: any public exposure came to be avoided automatically, as part of the protective coloration.

(She’s been sleeping much better, but with interspersed bouts of restlessness and discomfort in her backside and legs. Right now she was also uncomfortable as she waited for Seth to come through. Earlier today I’d told her I realized how cleverly she’d engineered her activities so that she didn’t go to the john very often. Right then, she hadn’t been to the bathroom since noon. “I’d go if I had to,” she protested, but I answered that she’d simply trained her body to wait as long as possible for such natural acts; then she could avoid all the discomfort of getting into the bathroom and on the john, etc. I added that I supposed now she’d work it so that she only went to the john once before going to bed after the session. I wondered if she was trying to set a record for holding it. By way of contrast, I wanted to ask Seth to comment on the good things her psychic abilities have accomplished. But right at this time she can barely get from her chair to sit on the john or the bed—literally.)

(“Good evening, Seth.”)

(A long, uncomfortable pause at 9:4l.) Ruburt could have said, “I bear no responsibility for Seth’s words, since they are not mine in the usual fashion.” On the other hand, while he did critically examine our material, he insisted in those terms “that he must be responsible for it,” in that he and everyone else must take normal responsibility in a fashion for “subconscious” actions or revelatory information.

(“Thank you, Seth. Good night.”