“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

He can do more now physically than he realizes, you see. He should try jumping rope in his mind, and then perform physically. Running as quickly as he can up and down your staircases is another suggestion. I do not mean that he overdo, but he is doing none of these things.

Running until he feels himself out of breath, or dancing to the same degree. [...] Strenuous exercise, not necessarily overdone you understand, but strenuous exercise physically and imagined, will in itself lead to the kind of deep relaxation that he also must learn now to achieve, and which is needed by the system.

[...] (Pause.) Let Ruburt follow the program faithfully, yet with a more carefree attitude toward it, with a more relaxed attitude, He should reread the book, yet in his free moments he need not concentrate upon the program. [...]

[...] He should in his exercises imagine strenuous exercise, running very fast for example, until in his mind’s eye his muscles are fully relaxed.

(Bob Hagel grinned at her, yet for a moment he didn’t know what to say. He had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. While he hadn’t made any conscious decision to leave the valley, he felt as if he had. He felt as if the whole thing was out of his hands. He sat there in his paint-stained khakis, a man almost forty, brave, cowardly, cocky. Before he spoke he tilted his brown-gray head at an earnest angle and stared at her with his usually severe face now wreathed with smiles. “Don’t take it so hard,” he said. [...]

[...] He forms a certain psychic and psychological framework, within which we operate. [...]

[...] The dreamer who dreams he was in Paris may well have been there.

[...] He goes out with these portions of himself, but because of the nature of reality projections cannot be recalled.

He knows what I am referring to. [...] He did indeed become afraid of faith itself. [...]

(Long pause at 9:05.) He is presently encountering that kind of feeling, uncovering the reasons for it, and trying to recapture in a way the very young innocent self’s sense of faith. [...] He is trying to uncover his own natural faith. [...]

[...] (Pause.) The Sinful Self’s material serves as a small psychic source at the moment: that is, he still reacts to it. [...] There are several lines of a poem and a few of the notes, untyped, that should be also typed at the same time—but he is pulling such issues together. [...]

[...] That is, he should type up the small bit of material, and read over the Sinful Self’s document. [...]

[...] If he keeps this up long enough, he will indeed strain a portion of the body, and by telling others about it he will gradually begin to affect not only his personal world, but that part of the mass world with which he has contact: It will be known that he has an ulcer, or whatever. [...]

[...] He may symbolically pick out an organ or a function, and he will misinterpret many body events in the same way that another may misinterpret mass events. [...] He will consciously and unconsciously focus upon that part of the body, anticipating its malfunction. [...]

(When he originally gave us the 812th session some 16 months ago, Seth told us it would “be part of a chapter later in the book….” [...]

[...] Let us take a hypothetical individual — one who is convinced he has a healthy body, and is proud of mental stability. [...]

The paragraph he read concerning your enduring love for him this evening struck him deeply. (Long pause.) There is no doubt that for many reasons given he feared the dependability of your love (long pause, eyes closed), if his actions did not please you. [...] To some extent then he felt even the safety of your relationship threatened when you became irritated, say, with Prentice. He became frightened in particular when he feared that his relationship with Prentice might make you ill.

[...] He explained the procedure if Jane goes to the hospital in Sayre. [...] He said Jane doesn’t have rheumatoid arthritis or thyroid trouble. Jim said he couldn’t comment on Jane’s situation from a medical standpoint, except to say her eyes per se are okay. [...]

[...] It is important then that he begin using his psychic abilities to help heal his own body, and he will begin doing that as he understands that it is indeed safer to let that tension go, and to free his psychic and physical motion. [...]

[...] Ruburt’s reaction to stressful situations was a repressive one: he did indeed often feel in a steady state of some alarm. [...] The panic he feels in some particular kind of relaxation episodes does indeed involve the psychological feelings that were buried within that releasing tension. [...]

You do not dissect a pet cat or dog, so when man began to dissect the universe in those terms he had already lost his sense of love for it. [...] Only then could he examine it, you see, without qualm, and without being aware of the living voice that protested (Jane now spoke in a much louder and deeper voice temporarily); and so in his great fascination for what made things work, in his great curiosity to understand the heredity of a flower, say, he forgot what he could [also] learn by smelling a flower, looking at it, watching it be itself.

Nature became then an adversary that he must control. Yet underneath he felt that he was at the mercy of nature, because in cutting himself off from it he also cut himself off from using many of his own abilities.

[...] “Wow, was he ever going strong. Boy … I didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was going to talk about tonight, but then I saw that he had one whole block of stuff to get through before he gave us any break….”

So he examined “dead nature.” Often he had to kill life in order, he thought, to discover its reality.

He sensed the house interior and the stairway vividly. He knew that the mother then went down the stairs to bring in the carriage, but when he tried to perceive this, the motion became too fast. The mother’s figure blurred so completely that he could not follow it. He felt confused, and found himself entering the store around the corner, and then consciously circled the block and went into the school.

The child was himself in the past on the one hand, and yet he was a probable future self in that past. [...] He could experience it only by sidestepping officially accepted neurological activity. He visited a store that is not at that location “anymore,” and here the sense data were somewhat clearer. He had no conscious memories of the store’s interior, yet it was instantly apparent to him — the dark oiled floor, spread with sawdust. [...]

The infant with whom he momentarily identified as the self he is now only opaquely and indirectly shared common experience. [...] (Pause.) He touched upon certain coordinates that were neurologically shared, however, by both: He and the child were familiar with the carriage and the curb, the mother who pushed the carriage, and the house into which Ruburt felt himself, as the child, being carried.

He toured his (public) grade school where he attended kindergarten to third grade,³ saw the children come out for recess, and felt himself one of them — while during the entire experience he knew himself as an adult, embarked upon that adventure.

He was a probable self of your grandfather’s and he kept in touch with you, and you were able to see him because of your own abilities. He noticed you, even as you noticed him, and in his probability he wondered who you were, but he liked you. He was a portion of your grandfather that your grandfather as you know him, could not be, and in many ways he was much freer than your grandfather. Now, he had a hobby and he made small dolls. These were dolls made of wood and into them he projected all of his creative energy, and he made a doll that looked like you, and he called it Susan without ever knowing where he got the name. He did not know it was your name, nor who you were. He lived in Germany in his reality. He was born in his reality in 1831 and died in 1897. [...] In out-of-body states, he projected into your reality. [...]

Now, he does indeed visit you while you sleep. He has been trying to communicate with you, and you must indeed relax for you are the one that adds these symbols of death. It is you who adds the symbolism that he rises from the tomb. He never knew the tomb, he left his body long before then. [...]

(Sharon asked Seth if he knew of the lady in the apartment over her, and what Sharon had done for this woman.)

([Sue: ]“He never seems to have any physical symptoms.”)

As he matures and learns, and studies and works, he will then be able to do this when he wishes to do so. [...] He has no discipline over it, and is sometimes in a state of consciousness that is between. [...]

He was dissociated enough to allow knowledge to come through that he did not realize he possessed. [...]

[...] He is so impatient. There is one question however that I will indeed answer now, and it has to do with the delight with which he views fire.

[...] He kindly allows me to use, or rather operate his vocal cords. And yet even this involves automatic translations of which he is not consciously aware.

Besides normal reasons, he was psychically inclined, at a time when Jane was young and herself close to a past life. [...] He felt strongly but could not explain. In his solitary nature he came close to being a mystic, but he was unable to relate his personality as Joseph Burdo with the social world at large, or even to other members of the family. [...] He felt strongly his connection with the universe as a whole and with nature as he understood it. [...]

[...] He attracts it, and it must therefore go through him, translated into outward experience. He is himself. He cannot turn himself or his abilities off … His activities would be strong in whatever level of activity he focused his energy, exaggerated in terms of others by comparison. He is a great mystic. [...]

[...] He was essentially childlike in one manner, and yet he had little use for most people. Had he lived to see Jane mature, the feeling between them might well have dissipated. He could not relate to another adult, and when in his eyes Jane joined the league of adulthood he would not have been able to retain his strong leaning toward her.

He never forgave his own children for growing up … Yet he related his own body, at least until the very end, very well with nature. He considered that he aged as a tree will age, but perversely he felt that others aged to spite him … From an early age, however, Jane drank in his feeling of completeness with nature, and it had much to do with her later development …

[...] He told her the book hadn’t arrived in the office yet, but that he expected it to, and that he would check to see if it was on schedule. He would then send us the usual first copy.)

(9:02.) He felt a strong commitment to poetry and writing. He could not early accept the idea of having a mission in life outside of the simple one to write, which always propelled him. He examined the sessions thoroughly then for years, not feeling the same kind of self-assurance as he did, you see, with his “own” writing. [...]

As far as dilemmas go, he feels one as far as Prentice is concerned, since he sees Prentice as a vehicle (underlined) that moves his work out into the public arena, and he feels that that vehicle is at best presently stalled, while no other one is in immediate practical sight. [...]

(Seth paused, so I asked: “But what does he think he’s doing? [...] I’m not asking for a perfect performance, and I couldn’t deliver one myself, but it’s extreme behavior on his part when he can’t walk across the goddam room—”)

[...] He is thin, with a white shirt that is not fully buttoned. He does not have a beard but his face is prickly and dark. He smokes and his fingers are long and stained with nicotine. His trousers are somehow strange, and he wears white shoes or not shoes, but his feet appear lighter, you see. There is a light behind him also and he stands at a partially opened door, and our friend the Jesuit speaks to him. [...] The stranger lives on the island and he wears a ring. He may also have on other jewelry. [...]

[...] There is a large wooden object that he is taken with, like a totem, fatter it seems though and not so tall as one. He speaks with several male natives and an American man, from Minnesota, who deals in a business that is connected with salt. [...]

[...] A native who is dressed in clothes that do not belong to him: he is performing. [...]

[...] He wanders far off from the others, the Jesuit. [...]

[...] Having requested help, he then hated himself for the weakness that he believed caused such a need. He glowered at our friend Ruburt with great vehemency, projecting all of the energy at his command to show that he would not be cowed, and that if anyone took over the situation he would be the one to do so. He spoke of another personality far more powerful than he — though, he said, he could force a roomful of a hundred-and-fifty people to follow his commands. [...]

He received a phone call from a man who lived in another state. [...]

He was a study, a living example, of the effects of conflicting unexamined beliefs, a fierce and yet agonized personification of what can happen when an individual allows his conscious mind to deny its responsibilities — i.e., when an individual becomes afraid of his own consciousness.

Here was a young man whose beliefs were alive with their own life while he was relatively powerless. [...]

Peg told me he was in his forties; he told her he’d written me but probably left before I could answer the letter. I felt defensive and guilty; he was trying emotional blackmail, and I didn’t want to see him. [...]

“Hello,” I said when he came to the phone, and his voice was dull and flat, full of self pity; he was sure I wouldn’t see him. [...] The next day I learned from Peg that he’d come by bus, had to stay the night, didn’t have much money—his reality, I reminded myself firmly, not mine. [...]

[...] In the meantime I was impatiently waiting Frank Longwell who promised the Tuesday earlier that he’d be here before Sunday with the final plans for extending the living room. He never came. [...]

[...] He told me that Prentice had called about a radio-phone show and that I was to return the call. [...]

(11:14.) He can expect a further easing in the head and neck areas. He first applied tension in those areas. [...] He should continue going to the bathroom as he has. Extremely valuable, since he consciously initiated an action that before he put off. [...] He began this by holding his breath, affecting the sinuses and tightening the whole head, neck, and shoulder areas. [...] He is breathing better, though he does not realize it —and this has helped in circulation.

[...] He is now casting them aside.

[...] He is adjusting to the new conditions.

[...] It is important of course that he does not concentrate upon the tooth as a problem. [...]

He felt that for artistic, financial, and personal reasons this was necessary. It was necessary because he believed that the spontaneous self, left alone, would not so concentrate—or that his spontaneous self would not, but would also be tempted by whatever other private pursuits. That belief built up a body of habits so that even when he made headway in changing the basic belief at least, he was left with beliefs about the body that were secondary but habitual; beliefs shared by each of you about his body, so that the evidence was always present.

[...] He is allowing himself leeway now. He does need to hold on, walking, with all of these changes. It is highly important, however, that he does not project negatively, as the paranoid does (as described in the regular 812th session). [...]

(10:54.) Now Ruburt, because of his beliefs, “artificially” disciplined his muscles so that he would be forced to concentrate upon what it seemed you and he both thought was most important in life—your work.

[...] He gets up easier, as well as sitting down easier—something he neglected to mention; nor did you observe this.

He was bound up with you in the past life and what he did not know then, and he knew much, he has picked up telepathically from you, since the washing machine was a visual distortion of the idea of a ship, which he interpreted as a tub. And from tub he leaped to washing machine, filled with water.

In Ruburt’s second dream he experienced no feeling of dread when he spoke of having cancer, because at the time he was not afraid. He reassured the two. [...] One was a lawyer in his younger days but due to trouble he died poor.

There is also a reason why Ruburt saw the former gallery administrator in the old woman dream, immediately after he perceived the old woman dead. [...] However, the elements of the dream were disintegrating, and he saw the woman in the form with which he is familiar with her in this life. The washing machine that he saw is an excellent example of subconscious knowledge distortion and fabrication.

I will here mention Ruburt’s dream, in which he spoke reassuringly to two men who were ill with cancer by telling them that this material said that he too had cancer.

[...] The man to which I refer is not terribly advanced in age, but he is at least 50. I do not believe he is over 80. At times he has a nervous twitch. He drinks coffee without milk and wears black shoes. [...] But if so, he has more drive than the son. [...]

A man in the background of your acquaintance, not connected with the company now, or if he is, he is far from your thoughts. [...] He appears to be offering you something for his own reasons, and for his own benefit rather than your own.

(Note: John’s experience at Rochester meeting recently—he saw his district supervisor’s face turn younger before his eyes as the man spoke at the meeting—about fifteen years’ difference, John said. [...] John didn’t know if anyone else saw it as he mentioned what he saw to no one, including the man involved.

[...] The man, according to John, was also strongly connected to John’s feelings about the company [or attitudes toward it] for he felt that the new man, a regional director, has some of the same attitudes he has.

[...] He believed that life was a life-and-death struggle, and having finally found what he wanted to do, his mode of survival, he brought out all of his artillery to protect himself while he did his thing.

In all of this he did not until recently realize, or want to realize, that he was not fully responding to his own life, or even that he was not fully functional, but “responsive” was the word. [...]

[...] He knows he feels softer—both ordinary tissue and his muscles.

He overgeneralized, so that each smallest distraction brought out the entire array. [...] You must remember what I told you of your reactions during those years—but your situation, to him, meant that he must work twice as hard, and perhaps have to make it for both of you.

[...] Ruburt has to a considerable extent largely disposed of the habit of negative projections, though he still catches some now and then. Except for the point of power, he has not actively promoted his desire to walk normally, and this was relatively wise, for as he begins to let go of effort he was not tempted to think of contradictions, as he might have had he more actively encouraged those desires.

It is true he has not been walking much. [...] Whether you have noticed or not, he has begun to gain weight again, and there are multitudinous small new motions, particularly in the bathroom, that he is scarcely aware of as yet.

It was natural enough for a while that Ruburt be quite aware of bodily sensation when he tried to “give up all effort,” but he is beginning now to sense the body’s pattern of activity, its relaxation, its stretching periods, and so forth. One important point: he gobbles experience, emphasizes it, studies it—and that quality also means that his bodily sensations are treated in the same manner. [...]

The material he received from me (Monday evening) was from me, and his suggestion that you work late that evening was the result of a creative impulse on his part. The material on variety is rather important, and also is connected with the fact that I suggested he forget the work sessions for a while. [...]