“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At the same time, I’d been a little concerned to learn of the affair lasting for three years, because that gave something plenty of time to become well entrenched. I didn’t really know whether his attraction to the woman involved had become obsessive, but did think elements of such a state were possibly involved. “Hell,” I’d said to Jane, “you don’t know what to say these days. You hear about something like that and right away you think of John Hinckley and Jodie Foster.” She had agreed. We await David’s letter. I should add that David said the feelings of panic—if that’s what they are—had gotten bad enough lately so that he’d stopped watching the woman involved on television.

(A couple of days ago Jane received from Tam a letter written to Tam by Saul Cohen, the editor at Prentice-Hall who’s evidently been assigned to shepherd Jane’s work through production. [Tam is still her regular editor.] In the letter Cohen had good things to say about her work, and the chances that Prentice-Hall will publish Seven III, the first five chapters of which Tam has forwarded to Prentice-Hall. There seems to be a chance also of trying to get Prentice-Hall to publish the three Seven books in simultaneous hardcover and trade paperback editions, if we interpret the letter correctly. Anyhow, the letter engendered immediate reactions in Jane of a very positive nature. Note: Cohen’s letter is dated October 13—yet according to Tam’s note on it, and postmark, he didn’t receive it until October 21—8 days later.

(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.

(Today was sunny, cool, and quiet, and when I saw that Jane was alert after lunch I suggested she try for a session. I’d planned to go food shopping. She’d been so relaxed this morning that I put her back in bed after breakfast. I hope she’ll come to see that living—sheer survival—comes first, then work/art. “Boy, I’m turning to water,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do, but I don’t know....” I thought she was charged-up enough over the letter to have a session. Her Seth voice was surprisingly strong, with the usual pauses.)

(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.

(As for the food and vitamin material, I’ve become less and less insistent that Jane adhere to any kind of regular program, since I think she continues to show that she’s not really sold on such therapy. I don’t really know whether that attitude negates my efforts or not. My original idea was simply to offer the physical body some help it could use, even regardless of the beliefs involved, and to use that help as a springboard for changing certain beliefs. I don’t believe any medication or vitamins—or anything else, for that matter—are going to do a person any good without a change in belief. That change would come about in a socially acceptable way through the medication.

(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.)