“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

The nuances of such a statement as I have just made are many. For now, however, I simply want to make the point that additional stress was added to the situation. A struggle for survival, it seemed, came more immediately closer, particularly in the light of the hospital situation. After his return home, the sinful self was threatened even further, it felt.

The term itself is probably not a good one, though it is of course highly descriptive. The panic has to do with many issues involving Ruburt’s earlier experience, particularly with his mother and the church when he was a very young person, very determined to survive in life, and trying to learn what kinds of behavior added to or threatened that survival.