“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.)

(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.

(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.)