“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“The mountains have fallen fathoms into the sea, and still I am I,” wrote Jane in a poem when she’d been quite young.

(“I became a priest of God to learn what sin is,” she also wrote. The priests she saw while she was living with her mother hadn’t liked those works, and castigated her for writing them. Jane rebelled. She refused to get a dispensation from the church so she could read certain works. She told me again about the book-burning a priest had conducted in her back yard, when she was a teen-ager. This is some of the free-association material we discussed on May 1.

(Jane has kept the session for April 30 in mind, but hasn’t tried any self-hypnosis yet. One of us has to see that she either reads or hears it each day. I’d had the idea of starting right in trying to hypnotize her, but thought better of it. I decided it was better to let her think over the session for a while, then lead into the hypnosis thing. I think the session in itself is a form of hypnosis, and an excellent one.)

(When I got to 330 today I found that the call light in Jane’s room hadn’t been working properly this morning, and now saw that it hung out of its fixture, half dismantled. People were coming and going in the room often — at one time there had been four nurses and aides there, laughing and joking. I tried to read the session for April 30 to Jane after lunch, and it seemed we were interrupted every few lines. In addition, a nurse had unintentionally gotten Jane’s medications mixed up this morning.

(Jane finally became quite angry and vexed, and burst out talking about the lack of privacy in 330 today. This was all part of our free-association material today, May 2. She vehemently expressed her feelings, with tears, that if she wanted privacy, being in the hospital wasn’t the way to get it. She’d always wanted privacy, she added. “It’s pretty dumb, because I sure as hell don’t get any privacy this way,” she exclaimed — and I thought she was clearing a road, as Seth had suggested last session.

(Jane reiterated that she hadn’t trusted her female body, and that she thinks she’s now paying for not having kids — after all, she’d been told that’s what women were supposed to do. She also thought the church’s teachings about motherhood were ambiguous. A sonnet by Shakespeare that she’d read in high school had also given her the idea that her role in life was to bear children, and forget everything else. She hadn’t liked the sonnet and hoped it would shrivel away. She thought the church meant that a woman should be either a nun or a mother.

(A repairman finally came to fix the call light, which meant Jane had to be covered while he was in the room. This too bothered her. She’d started out trying to read the session, but did poorly, so I finished reading it to her by 4:25. We’d had many interruptions by then. “Well,” she said, “I got pretty damned upset this afternoon, and I’m not comfortable, but maybe if I have a smoke and calm down I can have a brief session. I feel Seth around and he’s got a couple of comments, so I should get them.”

(“Okay,” Jane said, “it’s me.”

(4:35 p.m. “I’m telling you, I didn’t know whether I could have it or not,” Jane said. Her voice had become somewhat ragged and muted. I read the session to her. She’d really gotten upset shortly before the session. I reassured her, saying to let the session penetrate. Then, I said, “You can write your own book about all of this, like God of Jane.”