“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I’m writing these notes as though for a session, but I have no idea whether a session will develop. As I can note the next day, however, one did develop—so I’m skipping the typing of the sessions for November 8—the second one for that day—and November 9, in order to get right to work on this one. I think it has very important things for us to follow.

(Once again a crisis situation has come about. It’s now 8:30 PM. At about 7 PM, we were eating supper and watching Buck Rogers on TV, when Jane had another panic attack. This one was more extensive. It also took me a bit to realize that it was starting to show itself in the form of hallucinations or disorientation. Right after she’d finished eating, Jane began to ramble, talking about making impossible verbal rituals that she had to carry out before she could eat her ice cream for dessert. These periods were contrasted with examples of lucidity: “I’m going to make it,” although such periods were far in the minority compared to her ramblings about performing these rituals before she could perform any meaningful physical act like eating dessert. I cannot really explain what she said; it was too rapid and varied, and I had no notebook handy. She tried to make sense out of uncommon sense data. At one time Jane thought she was on the commode in the bedroom, and began to pull up her blouse. Another time she thought she was in her writing room while I did the dishes.

(One of my first thoughts was that the dreaded time had come—that no matter what Seth had been saying lately, or what Jane and I thought about her getting better, she was actually worse off than ever. I envisioned calling Dr. Kardon tomorrow, to get Jane into the hospital—a prospect both of us shrank from indeed. I thought that even my wife would be forced to agree to such a move.

(Our time was running out. If, as Seth has repeatedly said lately, Jane was clearing her psyche, then I feared that she’d begun her task too late, mentally and physically. As Peggy J had said today, Jane needed nursing care that neither she nor I could provide now. That leaves but one alternative, and my thought and fear is that if Jane goes into the hospital again, the sessions are over—for good. And who knows what the hell will happen to us for the rest of our lives? Of such ingredients are cosmic farces made, I thought. It can be seen that I was having a hard time to keep from falling into the deep pessimism I’d experienced not long ago, and seemingly had rebounded from.

(Jane refused to lie down this morning while I went to Gerould’s, so I had to get her out of bed, after changing the dressings, within 10 minutes. As I sit here writing this evening, her legs are fatter than ever. Yet she herself first came up with the insight tonight that the panic was expressing itself through her disorientations and/or hallucinations. A very important point, a creative insight. She got mad at me briefly just now when I demanded to know if I would really get a session tonight: “Bob, I’m trying as hard as I can. I said you’d get one. You’ll get one.” Yet the next moment she was back hallucinating. A few minutes ago she’d told me that she had to have the session in order to get rid of the anxiety-hallucination complex.

(10:15. By now my wife had thrashed back and forth in her chair—not violently—telling me often that I had to help her; she certainly acted disoriented. “Don’t bother writing now,” she said, but when I stopped nothing came of it—no crying, or even talk. I moved her chair to the spot at which I sat at the card table, as she directed. A minute later I moved her back to her usual place at the dining room table, again as she directed. Silence. The movie on TV’s channel 2 was a bloody tale of youths being killed one by one by wicked, deranged men, near monsters, in dark summer woods.

(But the notes drew themselves to a close. At 11:30 PM I gave her aspirin and one of the pain pills Hal Williams had sent her. Jane passively accepted them. “Don’t you have to go to the john by now?” I asked. She nodded. I wheeled her into the bedroom. I had a time getting her on the commode, and then into bed; half the dressings were pulled lose.

(“And I’ll tell you one thing,” I said, “never again are you going to sit up like that for all of those hours. You’re going to be nicer to your body from now on. No more are you going to sit up like that. Never.”