“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday morning I read Jane Tuesday’s session, concerning her exaggerated sense of responsibility, and so forth, and it seemed to have an almost immediate effect upon her: She became very relaxed. We had a discussion about ways to minimize that feeling of responsibility, should it persist to any degree. One of the topics was the mail. I thought of Jane confining her replies to correspondents via postcard only, or at least only rarely sending out the letters with a longer reply to someone truly in need.

(However, I told her we might have to dispense with answering the mail if no other relief is obtained—anything to cut down on the feeling of responsibility. I did mention one good point, I thought: If she must be involved with ideas of responsibility, then let her think that she has already fulfilled her responsibility to help others, through the work/books she’s already done. No need then to carry it further. She did have feelings of panic to a milder degree at times throughout the day.

(Pause.) Your mail presents you with glimpses of the people who read our books, from all walks of life, in all circumstances. You cannot follow their lives through from beginning to ending as you can in a book. You cannot write their “books” of life for them. You can comment very briefly on the small glimpses you have been given of another’s reality. The true interchange comes as those people themselves read our books, of course, and where our ideas intersect with their lives.

(I could add that yesterday and today especially the mail had embodied the extremes of response Jane often gets to her work—from the incoherent to the very complimentary, from people literally begging for relief from possession, say, to inquisitive, thoughtful letters from psychologists and other professional people. But I caught both of us talking about the “negative” letters rather than the positive ones.