“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.

(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.

This may take us a while. Ruburt is having the session now because he wants to make sure he does not miss anything. As I told you last time, you have indeed turned a corner of probabilities into what can only be a new era—which you have, incidentally, prepared for yourselves, as within the integrity of your beings you came to your own decisions.

(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....”

(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.)