“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(She added: “Now I don’t know whether the hospital experience was worth it or not.” We agreed her energy wasn’t any better than it had seemed before she went in, but at least Dr. Kardon’s treatment was supposed to be in the process of remedying that. [Dr. K is to see us tomorrow, to take blood for a thyroid test that may signal that it’s okay to raise the amount of supplement Jane is now getting.]

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.

She called me all kinds of names. (Long pause.) I tried to understand but felt half-doped—indeed. Maybe even half-duped, because I could never figure out when her crying outrage, her screaming anguish, were real expressions of nearly unbearable moments, or when she was acting. She could do that too.

It must have taken something for me, at 21, to leave her that summer. She attempted suicide again, this time by taking an overdose of phenobarbital. Instead of making her sleepy, however, it turned her into someone wild: she yelled and shouted and tried to get out of bed. I was afraid she’d fall on the floor. She was taken directly to the hospital when I called the doctor, and I went back home to that odd, nervous house that felt strangely vacant with her presence gone. I packed my clothes.

(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.

I took off with Walt on the motorcycle, and all the way across the country in my mind I heard her yell, “bitch, bitch, bitch.” Yet I’m certain I didn’t feel guilty. I was scared to death of her. For that matter, I was somewhat frightened of Walt, who threatened to leave me when he got angry in a new town we happened to be in, but we made it to the west coast.

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.

She had some jumbled psychic abilities, I suppose. She was great for reading tea leaves now and then, and I used to think how strange it was that she could do that yet couldn’t walk. She told me that sometime she walked in the night, and that some night she’d turn on the gas jets and kill us both. I really don’t know if it’s such a good idea to go over such memories or not, but since they came to mind I decided finally to have Rob write them down for me.

(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.