“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon Jane told me that she felt “panicky.” I’d known she was brooding—that was obvious—and withdrawn. She hadn’t even gone to the john since getting up around 8 AM—another form of withdrawal, I thought, once I gave it some thought.

(Nor did I say everything I thought, although I said plenty. There wasn’t anything new in any of it. I did ask Jane if she was aware of how a person could use a chronic illness to dominate another, to forestall rejection, and so forth, and she said she did. It’s a thought I’ve had often, but haven’t voiced. Nor has Seth, as far as I can recall. But it embodies massive contradictions, of course, for the very illness sets up strains in the relationship that wouldn’t even exist were the illness not present. This is one of the facets of the whole symptom business that has always puzzled me no end.

(I did dwell upon the fact that Seth—and Jane—have yet to go into the main question I’ve asked several times since she came home from the hospital: the current attitude and role of her sinful self. To me, I said, the sinful self is more active and domineering than ever before, and after all we thought we’d learned over the years. It rules her life more than ever before, since this year she became sicker than ever before. I still wanted to know why that portion of the personality was so blind to the harm it was wreaking—why it didn’t understand even in its own terms that its devastation was threatening greatly the very security and protection it has said it wanted. How could it preserve itself that way? I asked.

(Jane grew very unhappy as I talked, and I grew angry, as before—but we’d covered all the same ground often. I said I thought both she and Seth had avoided my questions about the sinful self, which I saw as part of the sinful self’s power to cover up issues it didn’t want to face, or considered threatening.

(Perhaps, I thought as I wrote these notes, I’d become badly conditioned over the last 15 years, so beset by constant worry and frustration that a “simple thing” like the expression of love became lost somewhere amid all the rubble. There was no doubt the session left me as frustrated and bitter as ever, but at least I had managed to get an admission that the sinful self was still highly active. I couldn’t believe that after all this time and effort over the years, we were back to square one, trying to figure it all out. I have strong doubts that we ever will.