“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(This morning she got up with me, after sleeping well, and again feeling traces of panic. Frank Longwell visited later this afternoon, and applied to Jane’s legs and back a heating device he’d lent us some time ago. It furnishes moist heat, and Jane found it quite effective; she ended up quite relaxed.

(Jane did decide to have a session tonight, though, since we’d missed last night’s, and we had company—Rhoads and Gallaghers—scheduled for Friday night. We waited a long time for the session to begin. I was tired and discouraged. Behind me in the fireplace our raccoon friends were mildly active. Otherwise the evening was quite cool and very quiet.)

(Long pause.) Ruburt has at times gone overboard in a feeling of responsibility toward those who write in need. The Sinful Self, so-called, now, is only too willing to accept such responsibility, for it believes to some extent that such responsibility is a kind of penance for its own shortcomings. (Long pause.) Ruburt is not responsible at all in such areas to hold sessions for others, or to provide that particular kind of individual help.

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.

(Long pause at 9:22.) Now nothing is all that simple, so there would be changes in his attitudes: He would tell himself, for example, that television or whatever would fritter away his time, or at other occasions other fears would rise so that the Sinful Self would think “Suppose such activity succeeded only too well, leading whole groups of people away from established systems of belief?” (Long pause.) There seemed to be little resolution. The only resolution of course is the realization that no such responsibilities actually exist. If he must think in terms of responsibility, then the only responsibility he has is to express the spirit of life as it is most naturally felt in his experience, through the development of his abilities in their natural flow (underlined).

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.