“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane had had thoughts of death when she came into the hospital a year ago. She was on morphine and had hallucinations, too. Frank Longwell’s father had just died, and she feared she might take the same road. She really did dislike women when she was younger. She’d been afraid of her body, and sex. Took it as a compliment when told she had a mind like a man. Also thought women disliked her — feared that she was after their men, and all kinds of things.

(“Years ago in the 1960’s,” Jane said, “I thought I loved you a lot more than you loved me, and that you could get along very well all by yourself.” I said that was a total misconception on her part, that I’d never had such ideas, nor wanted to do any such thing. It had never entered my head. I knew things bugged me — working, being an artist, or trying to, and so forth — but not anything to do with her. I didn’t even fear fatherhood as much as she feared becoming pregnant. Not that I wanted fatherhood.

(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.

(She’d even thought I disapproved of her way of dress at times, whereas, if memory serves me correctly, I’d almost always liked the way she dressed, fixed her hair, and so on. I made no such judgments. She said she’d brooded a lot.

(At 4:03 she said she was getting upset by our talk. I asked her to have a session on Seth’s remark about her symptoms being “amazingly stubborn.” She decided to have a cigarette and see if she could go into trance. I’d always thought the sessions themselves were a form of self-hypnosis. We’d talked about self-hypnosis as a way of breaking through today.

(When Jane spoke for Seth her voice was rather quiet, since it was still sort of raspy from yesterday’s laryngitis, or whatever she’d had. She thought the loss of voice volume was due to free-association material. A strong wind — very strong at times — had sprung up this afternoon, and at times I had trouble hearing Jane above its noise. Her eyes were often closed, and she took many long pauses. The day was alternately bright and sunny, and very gloomy and cloudy.)

(Very long pause.) He should also realize that pleasure is indeed a virtue. By all means express your emotions to each other as they naturally occur. Ruburt was not taught to love himself as a child, and thought of his talents as a way of justifying his existence — an existence of somewhat suspicious nature, he felt, since his mother told him often that he was responsible for her own poor health.

(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.)