“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We talked a lot about our early days together — work and our arts, prestige, money, and the opinions of others. I said that much of what we talked about would be considered the normal hassles in life, but that we had put negative connotations on those things and ignored the positive. Our told troubles now seem minute in retrospect. I added that each person is so different from each other person that it’s useless to make judgments, so each person might as well do their thing and let the chips fall. Who’s to say it’s right or wrong, as long as one doesn’t injure another, or steal, and so on.

(Jane said she thought that if I’d had to choose between painting and her, I’d have chosen painting. Not so, I said — after all, I worked at commercial art four years full time at one stretch, and part time a number of other times. She agreed that she needed much approval — something I hadn’t fully understood at the time we married. I added that I’d always been proud of her as my wife, and considered myself very lucky to have her. I’d never once questioned her loyalty or love, and I’d taken it that she felt the same way. I discovered today that I could have been wrong at times — strange.

(4:33. “I did pretty good,” Jane said as I lit a smoke for her. “I didn’t know whether I could do it or not. I almost came out of it a couple of times, but I did it.” I’d noticed the instances she meant. I read the session to her. She had a couple of thoughts as she listened to me. One: She transferred stuff about excommunication into the loss of companionship — that nobody would want anything to do with you if you crossed them up. Two: She’d tried to be more like me — cooler, not expressing so many emotions, more in control. And that had been a mistake on her part, a serious one, born, I said, out of her desire for protection and love.

(I hardly had time to discuss it with her, but I think the session is a breakthrough one that’s most valuable. It also showed me that even Jane’s poetry was suspect, where I’d been under the impression that the poetry was the one aspect of her creative abilities that was essentially free, or uncontaminated by fears or doubts. For years I’d thought that if Jane had done only poetry, she’d have had minimal troubles, if any.)