“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday, Jane wrote for me, at my request, a few lines about Seth’s remark in last Saturday’s session, to the effect that she’s been picking up some unusual versions of perception lately. The original is attached to this session: “I’ve experienced odd perceptions in relaxed states,” Jane wrote. “They involve what I’ll call innocent perceptions, to show their lack of sophistication. They involve the spontaneous combination of living objects and nonliving ones into curious juxtapositions. For example, I’ll see Rob’s head, with our floor-stand world globe growing out of it into a new kind of object.... which I’ll momentarily accept. I can disentangle these, and often several are included.”

(Shortly after I’d finished with the call, Jane asked me a question: “Does the name M-i-l-n-e-r mean anything to you?”

(At about 4 PM I quit work, and began to prepare for my nap. I wanted Jane to lie down also, since she’d sat in her chair since about 7:30 this morning. She hadn’t even gone to the john—the same behavior she showed last Saturday, when a session had been held that night. Now Jane told me however, that she was feeling “panicky.” She’d been dozing in the chair and woke up feeling that way. It got worse. I could see that she had no intention of lying down. “God, I’m scared,” she said several times, but couldn’t say why she felt that way, at first. Then she said she thought her fright was connected to her fear of abandonment as a child—and that she would finally make life so miserable for me that I’d leave her.

(I had several rather grim questions that had grown out of recent sessions—obvious ones—and could have easily come up with others. A primary one was why Jane’s personality would continue behavior that could bring on the threat of abandonment, as she saw it—the symptoms—if she had such a fear of that possibility. I saw this as very contradictory. Another question was why her overall personality would continue behavior that could conceivably bring about the eventual demise of the physical body—and thus the death of those very portions of the personality that were causing all the trouble, and had been for years. This didn’t make sense to me, in ordinary terms.

(“I might have to cry, to relieve myself of some of this tension,” she said. “Go ahead,” I replied. “The world won’t stop turning on its axis....” She made a few aborted attempts at tears, but they didn’t come. Her feelings of panic continued as I got supper ready, but she ate pretty well. After supper she told me to come out for the session at 8:15, but I was still working on these notes at 8:45, and she hadn’t called me.

(At 9 PM I sat at the card table adding to these notes while we waited for the session. Jane had me light a cigarette for her. The election-day results were coming over on TV now, but I’d paid little attention to them. Jane said there had been some upsets.

(By 9:15 I began wondering if we’d have a session. Jane had finished her cigarette but hadn’t taken off her glasses yet. I fed the cats and put them in the cellar. [Billy had caught a mouse in my writing room this afternoon.] “I’m just waiting,” Jane said, half-dozing. I thought she was probably tired from this afternoon’s upset, and also encountering resistance to the session. As I’ve mentioned recently before, the fear itself could have by now—must have—acquired a life of its own, after all of those years, and it would as an entity resist being dispensed with, or transformed. If only Jane could understand that she had nothing to fear by way of abandonment from me, I thought. I repeat that statement here, again.

(By 9:30 I couldn’t believe it: We weren’t going to have a session after all—and just when we needed one most. Jane alternated between rather quick changes in waking and sleeping in her chair. I lost patience after a while, mostly due to sheer frustration, I suppose. She was somewhat disoriented: “Just read me last night’s session,” she said. But we’d had no session last night, Monday. We hadn’t had one since last Saturday, October 30—four days ago.