“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane began to cry when she recounted the time at home a few years ago when she couldn’t get up and on her feet — finally reaching that point of helplessness. I got mad at her and yelled, saying I’d leave her sitting there if she didn’t get up — thus displaying my own deep fears that we had reached a sad and desperate point in the course of the symptoms. She remembered my crying at times. I told her I’d cried at times when she hadn’t known it.

(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.

(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.)

(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.

(4:45.) In other words, Ruburt was given strong creative abilities that he was determined to express — but at the same time early in his life he was given the idea that it was highly dangerous to express the very uniqueness that was inherent in his creativity. This is a part of the main issue.

(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.)