“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I had several questions resulting from Jane’s material of yesterday. A remark that I’d made, to the effect that her illness has probably cost us at least half a dozen books over the years, elicited a response from her; she brought it up today, in fact. Now, she said, she wasn’t doing anything except a little bit each day. She’d picked up the idea of discipline from me, in a most unfortunate way, I thought, considering her most spontaneous nature. We talked about why her psyche had done so. She agreed that she is protected from life in the hospital. She also thought that she personally couldn’t live up to the high quality of the Seth material — her own “mental work,” a good way of putting it. The symptoms, then, served to keep her at her desk over the years because she was afraid that if left alone she’d fly off somewhere and wouldn’t do anything.

(The symptoms — and now the hospital — protected her from criticism, eliminated book tours, the whole bit. Jane got scared with Sumari in the beginning, just as she had at the start of the sessions in 1963, but she was also very curious and turned on. She was also frightened at the tests in sessions, of being wrong, and of the seance. Thought she’d be called a hysterical woman, an exhibitionist, and so on. Being right didn’t carry the weight that being wrong did. Very good. There were tears at various times with today’s material.

(I talked about the first session for Jane’s symptoms — the private portion of Session 208, for November 15, 1965 — yet she said that for her the whole thing really started the day before we went to a party in June 1966 regarding How to Develop Your ESP Power. Our friends wanted to celebrate the publication of her first “psychic” book, her first mention of Seth, but she read poetry at the party and wouldn’t talk about the ESP book — too embarrassed. A strange, protective way to behave.

(At 4:40, she was near tears when I asked why her psyche hadn’t risen up to protect her when it became obvious that she was heading for deep trouble with the symptoms. She said her psyche did rise up to protect her many times — otherwise she’d have died, of course. She mentioned various periods of improvement — her work on her unfinished and unpublished autobiography, From This Rich Bed; her published novel, The Education of Oversoul Seven, and so on. But each time a new book came out she got worse. Near tears, she said that she didn’t have to get any worse when a new book comes out — what’s left? She agreed with me that she now has the ultimate protection of the hospital.

(Long pause.) Ruburt felt that his writing, and writing abilities, justified his existence — that it, the ability to write should make up for all other deficiencies. His mother helped make him feel unlikeable, but his abilities seemed to be his saving grace — and therefore to be encouraged and protected at all costs.

(Yet she finally admitted that she knew she’d succeeded with my mother — not with my father, though. As to her own mother, Marie, I said it was perfectly okay to admit that she didn’t succeed there, or chose to withdraw or admit failure. Jane thought her mother hated her as a child, and still did even now. The mother’s hatred, Jane said, led to her need for protection — perfectly normal, I said. Jane said that when he was drunk her father told her that Marie was her enemy. Evidently she believed this.