“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(3:12. After a cigarette and watching In Search Of Jane began reading yesterday’s session. Slow at the start, but she did better as she went along, amid pauses. Seth had talked about her blueness and crying last night. When Jane got to the end of the session, and read my own notes about my own crying spells, she began to cry while reading aloud—but she kept going, and finished in good style. I felt tears, listening to her.

(“I was going to tell you about them sometime,” I said, meaning my own blue periods, “but I hadn’t done it before because I didn’t want you to feel bad. It just came out in yesterday’s session, spontaneously—I didn’t plan it that way.”

(Long pause.) They end up actually threatening their children, though usually they do not of course understand what they are doing. A mother might say, “Don’t run, or you will fall down,” or “Don’t talk so much, or people will not like you.” In any case, often children grow up with the idea that proper behavior consists mainly in avoiding danger. The emphasis is not upon pleasure, but on the avoidance of pain. Children are taught to repress their emotions rather than to express them.

Such negative patterns in childhood cause adults to be frightened of freedom—because freedom seems to imply a threat to life and to health. There are also people, of course, who never fall prey to such unfortunate cycles, but instead remain exuberantly free and healthy. Even so, health to most people means the absence of disease, rather than a state of exuberant well-being, challenge, and fulfillment.

(“I sent it out with the tray after lunch,” I said. It didn’t occur to me until later to wonder whether she actually meant the menus for today, which dietary has lost, or the one I filled out today for tomorrow’s meals. She stayed but a moment. “Okay,” I said to Jane. Resume at 4:33.)

Animals can be obedient to their masters, and be healthy and exuberant at the same time, but in the terms of nature, no matter what social customs might say, no person can be obedient to a master and be healthy and exuberant at the same time.

(4:41 PM. Jane had done well, I told her. She sipped some ginger ale. “I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not,” she said, “but for the last couple of days I’ve had the suspicion that he’s started another book. Maybe he didn’t want to tell me so I wouldn’t get upset about it. But when he says “comments” I figure he’s separating book material from stuff about me....”

(Jane said she’d go over the last few sessions and show me where she thinks the book started, but I said it was probably quite obvious. The thought of a new Seth book didn’t bother me. “It’s okay by me,” I said. I thought it marked a significant advance actually for it showed that she’d reached a point in her progress where she felt she could afford to devote some time to creative work that wasn’t just for herself.

(And the phone in 330 didn’t ring. and I didn’t hear from billing, or Andrew Fife, about any messages relayed to him from Syracuse. I’ve managed to keep my mind off the whole situation for considerable periods, though occasionally the subject returns and I catch myself thinking about it. But those periods seem to vanish, to my pleasant surprise.)