“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

[...] Pete didn’t call, and I didn’t do a damned thing except get up, clean up, get the paper and feed the cats, eat breakfast and go to work marking up Chapter 4 of Dreams, which I finished typing a couple of days ago. [...]

(I’m sure my improved attitude resulted from the last two sessions—plus other recent ones—but I have resolved anew that I must simply concentrate upon my creative work each day, see Jane and help her as much as I can, and spare my body consciousness the needless stress of worrying about the future. [...]

[...] They often happen when she moves her left arm, she said—the two sort of working in tandem. [...]

[...] She had a cigarette while I worked on mail. [...]

[...] He cannot be so concerned about Work capitalized, and underlined four times—that it devours his being, or there will be no work. [...]

Old habitual thought patterns are being worked out through the dream communications. [...]

[...] So will his “work” be enriched and fulfilled—but because he is joyfully himself. [...]

(Rembrandt copiously achieved this effect in his later works, especially the last ten years or so of his life. [...] I am well aware of it, and want to use effects similar to this in my own work, and have done so at times in past works. I haven’t discussed it with Jane, though, just considering it a technical problem involved in the art, as I would suppose she would work at writing a paragraph, etc.

[...] They knew precisely how much you would work for, and to what ends you would work. [...]

Too many compromises do sap your strength and energy, and the work compromise was inhibiting your painting to some extent. [...]

[...] Otherwise you would find other people’s reactions far too alien, and not be able to relate to them personally or through your work. [...]

(My personal problems developed in force when I began to be overly concerned with my creative “work” as work, as it applied to the world, as it would be received and interpreted; when I tried to compare its reception to other officially accepted activities—that people understood—when I tried to look at my “work” through their eyes, and when I began to expect the kind of honor and approbation given to others—who conformed.

[...] I am“lucky” that the books sell, and that does mean that the world does accept “my work” to a certain important degree. [...] If you confuse the issues you try to temper your creativity (to gain approval, etc.) which can dilute the work; or you set up protective measures to protect yourself against the worlds disapproval or scorn.

Ruburt would have continued to work, though physically quite incapacitated. [...] You both had something very strong working for you, still strong enough to help, and that was the creative intuitive nature, which would have in one way or another made the facts plain.

[...] The fingers, connected with his work… Here he refused to budge. [...] They were also fat however, for he still considered them powerful in regards to his work.

[...] Working with the meticulous temperas, you actually worked out inner problems in a way that was not frightening, and gave you a sense of challenge and accomplishment.

[...] The duality in your own psychic condition, Joseph, would have eventually destroyed your capacity to work.

[...] It would help you however to attempt larger work. You are afraid of tackling too much feeling at once, and the mere fact of working larger would free you from this to some considerable extent.

Ruburt need not spend 24 hours a day thinking about his work. [...]

[...] Let him work so many hours and then concentrate elsewhere. [...]

[...] Working with the table was sufficient, you see. [...]

For many years, at least seven, he has been deeply concerned about your work, a repressive element in it, and the psychic freedom he felt you needed to release it. [...] Your best energies were going into your work, he felt, at the job, not into painting, and the very focus divided you. He felt it disloyal to recognize the repressive element in your work, and tried to pretend he did not see it.

[...] He knew you were not a Sunday painter, but he felt you were greatly repressed in your work, and that any breakthrough could only come when you focused upon it, your work, regardless of other consequences.

[...] There will be no fears of unrestrained sexuality, or not working creatively, of overidealization of me, or my work, etc. [...]

[...] I was often forced to structure my work along lines that would bring approval. [...]

The reason that he could not get rid of the symptoms was simply that he believed them necessary requirements to his work. The symptoms and curtailment of activities were invisibly combined, so that he did not realize you could consciously set up a system in which you could work freely without distractions, and be perfectly free to do whatever else you wanted otherwise.

(Jane had obtained excellent material on her own today, working with beliefs about her writing, symptoms, and movement about the house. [...]

[...] The inward work ends up causing them to relate to a physical world when they believed that their duty was to shut themselves off from that world.

Because many of his ideas and beliefs were also bound up with you, your work, your ideas and his interpretations of them, then your relationship became entwined. [...]

[...] We need have no worries concerning the personality with whom I work, since there is by now some sort of a rapport that will work for us. [...]

[...] But if we work together, I will reserve for myself the privilege of saying to them what I choose. Otherwise I shall work well within the bounds of propriety. [...]

We will consider ways in which we can work within the physical circumstances. I want to also use the potentials in which I can work. [...]

[...] On Saturday evening he leafed through some of the Seth material briefly, then pronounced it the work of a clever schizophrenic. [...]

[...] Another point I would mention: Ruburt knows quite well your own progress in your own work. He has always been psychologically and psychically attuned to your work. [...]

[...] I am going to give you some comments on the situation you have been discussing, and I am going to do some more work on my book. [...]

[...] For example, Ruburt is doing very well in his classes, enjoys it, and closes his eyes, relatively speaking, to the improvement he has worked in the lives of his students, and to the freedoms he has allowed himself in class in using his abilities. [...]

[...] He does not have to work for it. [...]

[...] I massaged her toes as Seth had recently suggested, which got good results, then after I’d turned her, I gently worked her right leg back and forth as Seth had suggested. The knee of the broken leg actually works quite freely, I remarked — much more so than the left knee. [...]

[...] I’d worked on taxes for an hour this morning, and Dreams. [...]

[...] I began working with mail, and Jane started reading yesterday’s session. [...]

[...] Thus, the amazing organization usually works in a smooth, natural fashion. [...]

[...] The facts are, though, that Jane’s already impaired physical condition grew steadily worse while she was working on the book. [...] Since we’ve always wanted to make sure that our “psychic work” is given within the context of our daily living, I’ve undertaken to present in these essays intensely personal material relevant to the creation of Dreams. (The mechanics of Jane’s still-fascinating trance phenomenon have been described in some detail in the six previous Seth books she’s produced—with my help—and they’ll also be referred to, if briefly, in Dreams.)

I worked on the essays in succession, just as they’re given here, although I found myself adding to the earlier ones as I moved into the later ones. [...] I did not look at Seth-Jane’s Dreams itself while writing the essays, in order to avoid having them overly influenced by work in the book. [...]

Seth, then, has finished his work on Dreams. I wrote the original version of the notes for each book session as he delivered it through Jane, and also began collecting other notes and reference material that might be used. [...]

[...] It has the great attribute of allowing for quick reference timewise (if not always by subject matter) to any of the more than 1,500 regular, private or deleted, and “ESP class” sessions Jane has given over the past 19 years—until July 1982, that is, when I began work on these passages.

[...] One point I want to mention: Ruburt’s mother tried to escape poverty through the calculated unrelenting use of her beauty, and it did not work. Ruburt in his own way tried to escape poverty through the use of his brains, and he was afraid that that was not going to work either. [...]

[...] These also had to do with the unremitting purpose of work. In the meantime his intellect and intuitive abilities both discovered that the daily joy of living was important—as important as “work” or money.

[...] Carried too far, such an idea can lead to an isolationism in which only work is important, and the daily joys experienced by others become unimportant and trivial. The very intuitive feelings behind the writer image were based upon the mysticism of nature, the joy of creaturehood; and yet pursued with too much literal-mindedness, the determination to write, once equated with work, led to important denials in those precise areas.

Other adjustments are being made first to insure overall balance and coordination, as work is being done on the knees, leg muscles and feet. [...]

Ruburt has not worked on the dream book since Fell’s letter. [...] Work on the dream book should now be added daily however, and the suggestions read before the work is begun each day.

You are close to releasing yourself in a particular way through your painting, through your work, and you will find this way intuitively. [...] It is this very nearness that made you dissatisfied with what you had just finished, an inner comparison of this with work you will do in the very (underlined) near future; and no reflection on the leaf painting, except by future contrasts. [...]

[...] The whole personality has to work these characteristics out in physical terms in order to discover through direct experience where they would lead.

Had he been working on the dream book also there would have been some noticeable improvement by now, because of the financial conditions there also. [...]

Again, a note: when Ruburt talks about his work, this is often a ruse, an excuse, to hold back from free, playful, intuitive or psychic experiences. You both like to use the word work to show others that you are not irresponsible, and that you work twice as hard as they do. [...]

Creative work must transcend time, and when he is writing well, time is forgotten. [...] That cannot be compared in any way with the amount of work done by someone in a normal eight-hour day. Someone could work at a poem for eight hours, and have nothing. [...]

He feels guilty, for one thing, that you prepare supper, but if he has not worked as much as he thinks he should have by then, that guilt is added. He feels it is the end of the normal working day for others, and therefore he should have put in so much time.

[...] 4. As we discussed those questions before the session, I wondered whether the poor results of her daily predictions concerning the mail might have a similar basis, whether she told herself or not that she wanted such impressions to work out.

[...] The height of the building represented the heightened state of awareness upon which our work rests. That work must then be “brought down” from that stage of consciousness to the ordinary one, and to the people of the world—an enterprise—

—that can appear most arduous at times, when you begin to think about the work involved, while the other part of you goes calmly on, bringing the books to the public one by one, so to speak. I do not mean by the term “rarefied atmosphere” that you live in a world superior to other people’s—only that our work is, in those terms, uncommon, highly original, and in many ways mysterious—for it confounds many of the conventionalized concepts of the daily world in which you live.

[...] One thing became quite clear as we talked: The fund idea abruptly led us into looking at our beliefs and motives and “work” in new ways—a valuable service right there. [...]

You have little idea (long pause) of the magical feeling of discovery (pause) with which many of our readers regard our work. [...]

You two have largely worked alone, and your work goals involve of course the development of personality characteristics that must apply to artistic work. [...]

[...] The first one came early this morning after I’d shoveled but a few scoops of snow in the driveway—no work involved at all, really, but I had to quit for fear of having an “attack” of some kind. [...]

[...] This portion of the self is often altered, its characteristics becoming less apparent as individuals move through the various social groupings of work, church, or community, where it is obvious that the standards of behavior are hardly rigid, but adaptable.

[...] It is indeed foolish enough to take it for granted—at least part way (and with irony)—that everything—All That Is, the important things—will somehow work out all right. [...]

[...] Your work is still developing. [...] There is always a kind of artistic dissatisfaction that any artist feels, any true artist, with work that is completed—for the true artist is always aware of the difference between the sensed ideal and its created actualization—but that is the dimension in which the artist has his being (intently). That is the atmosphere in which his mental and physical work is done, for he always feels the tug and pull, and the tension, between the sensed ideal and its manifestation. [...]

[...] Certain portions of that person, as you know, would have been satisfied with drawing comics, or doing certain kinds of commercial work. [...] Their work is quite mediocre, but they are satisfied. [...]

[...] However, at various times the pendulum has given me all kinds of other reasons for my physical ills: taxes, money, Jane’s symptoms, success and failure—the works, one might say. [...]

The web is a work of art, the spider’s home, and the source of his food as well. [...]

You work at home. You are reacting, and have been, to some of your mother’s attitudes toward men who work at home, so you try to prove to yourself and others that this is really not only as difficult as outside work, but more so. [...]

Ruburt sees, and so do you, that other publishers would be glad to take our work—and you no longer feel “trapped” by Prentice, and “Prentice’s incompetence” in certain areas. [...] It does become safer, and even you personally this time can see Prentice as a creative adjunct with which you can work.

[...] There’s no need to go into all the complicated details here; it’s enough to say that the photos Bantam used in Seth Speaks were involved, especially the cover shot of Jane; as well as bids for Oversoul Seven between Pocket Books and Bantam; Jane’s fears that she’d end up committed for two more Seven books she hasn’t written yet; and various misunderstandings concerning ethics, expired option, and an offer to Jane to go to work for Simon & Schuster-Pocket Books, and to take Tam with her.

[...] You do not tell people that you are doing well—you tell them that you must work from morning to night; that you do not have enough time. [...]

They were not worked through, however, and he stopped the practice. Unknowingly you were working on the two levels given in my last session, through suggestion, building self-confidence while Ruburt wrote out his gripes and conscious thoughts. [...]

[...] The charge built up, for him (underlined) about time and work, is masking of course his fear of not achieving as he wants to. [...]

[...] I suggest this because it will help you both with your work. [...]

[...] Future psychic work was also dependent upon a (in quotes) “correct” decision on his part.