“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At my urging we sat for the session at the card table at 2:25 PM. Just as we did the phone rang. It was David Butts again—telling me that since our talk last week he’s been free of the rather obsessive thinking about sending and receiving telepathic messages involving a certain female comedy star who appears on a late-night TV show. [He wouldn’t tell me who the personality is.] I’m David’s uncle.

(In our first talk I’d suggested to David that he write us a letter describing his attraction to this woman, and he called today to say that he was mailing such a missive, after rewriting it a couple of times. I’d thought the letter idea might help him put the whole affair, which he says has gone on for three years, in better perspective. I’d explained that I thought the personality was a symbol to him, of what I couldn’t be sure quickly. He’d told me that the fixation, or whatever, had gotten worse lately, and that he’d had strange palpitations and breathing difficulties when he began to think of her. He hadn’t been able to just shake off the feelings involved.

(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.

(I’d meant to write up a more detailed account of what is really an interesting case, but had become sidetracked by the Fred Conyers experience, work, and other things to do. I’d even forgotten I’d told David to write. I was a bit surprised to hear he’d been so free of the feelings so quickly after our talk. I’d immediately suspected that he called us because he needed help that he wasn’t getting from his parents, but didn’t say this to him. I did downplay the telepathy ideas, however, thinking it was much better that he solve the puzzle through ordinary channels and approaches.

(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.

Now so is our work birth of a different kind, quite as natural. It is in fact a kind of pre-birth that is in one way or another intertwined before any birth of a physical kind can emerge—and so of course its effects will become known. You are involved with work and lives that are your own. (Pause.) You understand, almost without realizing it, issues (long pause) that were once great impediments in your world: you have left them behind, never realizing it.

(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.

(“Your readers certainly don’t expect that of you,” I said, explaining that I was keeping in mind Seth’s recent statement that both of us had decided upon our joint experiences, wanting and not wanting the symptoms at the same time. “Your readers write asking for help with the idea that you’ve managed to solve certain challenges that they’re still struggling with....”

(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.)