“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I guess I thought that I’d keep up some level of communication if I talked as I am now, and Robbie took the words down. Come to think of it, I did feel fairly hopeful this morning for brief snatches. I was going to record some memories that suddenly came to me yesterday morning. Of the last few months or so I spent at my mother’s house—when she called me time after time during those spring and summer months of 1950: she wanted her pillows turned, she cried out in rage and pain—and here I was some 30 years later, calling out to Rob (voice breaking) to move my pillows or raise my head.

But I thought, “My God, I should be able to forgive my mother anything, being in that state, with a child beside.” No wonder she raged and screamed and struck out—yet I certainly, as far as I know, don’t hold myself to blame, since I understood as well as I could. And helped in whatever ways I could. But surely my attitude as well as hers must have helped build a wall between us.

(11:28.) I had told her a few days before the suicide attempt that I was leaving. I’m not sure, but I think I told her. We had a salesman who used the place as a business address, and he was there that night. I don’t remember much about him, except that he wouldn’t help. He got in his car as fast as he could and drove away, leaving mother raging on the bedside.

So I wonder how much of this started then. I honestly thought I’d put most of that behind me—yet my early novels all dealt with the relationship between my mother and others, in various guises, and I know I was afraid that somehow she’d end up turning me into her.

(I told Jane that as I listened to it some of the material sounded contradictory. That is, the young girl must have had some feelings of guilt for leaving her prostrate mother, etc. I thought that was perfectly natural, but extending those feelings for the next 30 years would seem to be too much in nature’s scheme—as I’ve said before, it doesn’t seem to me that nature necessarily wants things to work that way, while making perfectly possible the fact that they can, if one chooses. This may be a case of things being redeemed on a “higher” level, I suppose—reminding me of material I’ve been dealing with recently in the intro for Seth/Jane’s Dreams.

(I also said that I thought today’s material was the result of Jane’s reading that intro after breakfast yesterday, which had triggered her day-long black mood of despair. I thought the intro had triggered Jane’s material about her mother—for here Jane was, creating—or at least mimicking—her mother’s situation on her own. Jane’s material this morning seemed to show that her buried feelings about her mother were much stronger than she’s suspected, and more damaging. Perhaps we’ll discover that they play as strong a role in Jane’s dilemma presently, as my wife’s Sinful-Self material. For Jane the two sets of material-beliefs could be very closely related—seems like this would be almost inevitable.