“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.

(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.

(With emphasis at 9:04:)I have never proclaimed myself to be a healer—nor for that matter a specialist. Our work should end up to some extent illuminating many fields of knowledge and interest, because it is not directed to one or another subject matter, and certainly not restricted to information that must be immediately utilitarian. The natural flow of the sessions has never run in that direction, nor has Ruburt’s own natural inclinations.

(Pause.) The feeling of responsibility to help those in desperate need is but one facet, however, for he has felt a responsibility (underlined) to get our material to the people as soon as possible—a responsibility to appear on television or otherwise, to promote our ideas, or to present them to the world—a responsibility that I have not encouraged.

Creativity often deals with material that is not known, not cut-and-dried, not even immediately useful, perhaps—so Ruburt would feel, for example, sometimes at least, that poetry was not responsible, or even that his own spontaneous activities were not responsible unless they were immediately useful in practical terms. At one time or another, the idea of responsibility was overlaid upon his ideas of work. All of this made him feel that he was not living up to expectations, that he was to some extent a failure for not doing all of those things.

(Very long pause.) People often react to their beliefs about the kinds of persons they should be, and to imagined events. In such a way that the imagined ones are as real in their effect upon their lives as physical events are. In some cases the imagined events never do show. A person may see himself or herself, say, as a daring explorer, an inventor, an opera star or whatever, and react against such images. They may be perfectly normal people—even gifted in other fields rather than in the specific field of their dreams. However accomplished they might be, however, some consider themselves failures because they have not lived up to those ghost images. Now there are reasons for such behavior. In Ruburt’s case, however, he felt that he should (underlined) act on all the other ways I specified, though he did not want to. Again, on occasion he promised himself that if he walked normally he would be only too glad to perform in such ways. This simply added to the threatening picture. He was also afraid that spontaneously he might want to do such things after all, as if his spontaneous self would work against his better interests.

It shows a change of belief —being willing to bring the body physical pleasure instead of the Sinful Self’s idea of, say, penance or atonement. Pleasure is good for the body and the soul. Religions have been denying the right of the body to pleasure for centuries, so changes in those attitudes are significant. I’ll bring the session to a close. It is enough to digest at one time, unless you have a question you particularly want answered this evening.