“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(David has told his parents of his yearnings toward this person, he said, and his father responded by telling him it was “all in his head.” Naturally, I had no idea whether telepathy was involved, but had attempted during the first call to explain our ideas of such possibilities. I doubted it in this particular case.

(Jane became very relaxed, “out of it,” and actually smiled in relief. It then became evident that a lot of her poor feelings lately have been connected to worries over work, what Prentice-Hall would or wouldn’t publish, etc.—an old reaction that I should have been more prepared for, I guess, but had lost sight of in our day-to-day hassles. “My body seems to be getting softer all over,” she said. Yesterday and today she has been very relaxed. The extra movement in her knees continues. She slept often in her chair. She reread the letter several times, as did I. We must wait for John Nelson’s return from Europe at the end of the month for some details to be resolved, however.

(2:51 PM. Jane’s voice had maintained its volume. I waited to see if anything else might come through. She took a few moments to come out of it. “Give me a cigarette. If I get anything more I’ll go back in....” Later: “All right, I guess I’m going to do something more.... But I don’t know....” Off came her glasses. “I feel strange.” In a voice still strong:

(3:08 PM. “I can’t remember all of that,” Jane said, “but it seems really significant. As if something’s happened.” She had been aware throughout the session of Seth’s stronger voice and more forceful delivery.

(I wasn’t at all sure, but I wondered whether Seth’s second delivery might have been in response to the talk Jane and I had had recently, in which I’d tried to explain my own ideas about the extent to which one could go with personal challenges like illness, say, or work, or whatever. Some of it had been based upon bits of Seth material that had come through lately, along with my own long-standing ideas.

(I won’t try to repeat it all here by any means, though at the time I’d thought I had some good things to say. Jane had agreed, so I thought. The gist of it had to do with how far one wanted to carry one’s personal challenges, and that these limits or extents would be different for each individual. My own reaction to the events in our lives over the years was that consciously we had reached limits, and that it was beholden upon the rest of the personality—Jane’s especially—that it recognize this and back off enough from its own goals so that the physical body could recover, at least enough to ensure survival and a working life in which it could deal with life’s daily goals, and arts, too. Otherwise, I said, the whole process becomes self-defeating not only for the conscious portions of the personality, but for the very body itself. Granted that certain individuals could choose to pursue certain goals and challenges even through the point of physical death, never relaxing that focus; still, most did not.

(“We’re all going to die,” I said, “so what we’re really talking about is how and when that death takes place.... If you, or anyone, chooses to extract the utmost from whatever experience is decided upon, then you have to go with that. But it’s also like saying that a doctor can’t help people with cancer unless he gets cancer himself, so that he really knows what it’s like. Somewhere along the line you have to decide upon a cutoff point—that is, all portions of the personality have to do that together, or the conscious self is dragged along unwilling to cooperate....”

(At this point I am more than reasonably sure that Jane began to show certain marked improvements after I initiated the vitamin, peanut-oil, cod-liver-oil daily routine: Her hands first began to show definite reductions in swelling within a very few days, and this was followed by an excellent increase in her knee movement a few days later. Certain B-vitamins in the regimen were each supposed to help these specific areas, and evidently did so. I am quite aware that these changes were also accompanied by possible changes in belief, since we’d talked about what we were doing, obviously. But certainly more than coincidence is involved here. I do think I’ve seen similar temporary changes in belief before, without the accompanying changes in the hands and knees. More minor changes, possibly [though offhand I don’t recall them], but nothing like what’s now taking place. My personal opinion is that the combination of all three elements—vitamins, peanut oil, and cod liver oil, have helped a great deal in achieving these improvements, and that each time we pass up the “treatment,” which is absurdly simple, we do miss out on something helpful. But I may be wrong. Seth has promised to comment.

(I suppose I could run on and on about why Jane herself doesn’t leap upon something that appears to help with so little time and effort involved. Instead, I’m the one who tries to initiate these things. All of this is a very old story. To me it speaks very clearly of forces holding back, of resisting changing the status quo. As I said during our conversation, evidently after one has entertained certain feelings and ideas on unconscious levels for a long while, they take on a life of their own, and eventually actively come to resist being dispensed with: They are living, and do not want to die. Instead they seek to perpetuate their existence as surely as any other living organism does, and in certain senses come to appear to be irrational, in that they seem unable to understand that certain beneficial changes would perpetuate their own lives as well as that of their host, whom they are damaging overly much. Many deaths must be directly attributable to these kinds of mechanisms operating, and I would imagine that psychologically it’s an old story.)