The Tragedy of Mediumship
When I first became interested in spirit, I was absolutely bowled-over by the Jane Roberts "Seth" books. Oh happy days in 2009, 2010 and 2011 reading those books, marveling at the wisdom and sensitive intelligence therein.
There was something that troubled me, but I repressed it. Jane Roberts, the medium, seemed to be very creative. She and her husband had a lovely relationship. They embarked on a life together with great promise. However...when "Seth" spoke through her, she was "miles away." She was lost in some basically pleasant "place" and didn't always know what Seth talked about.
Seth said that he could only express his ideas to the extent that the mind of the medium had contact with similar ideas, or at least, ideas which he could use by analogy to finally get his point across. So he was very complimentary of Jane's mind, as being highly suitable for him to communicate through.
My worry was: extended over decades...what is the cost of Jane's "zoning out" to the development of her life?
We're being good guests if we eat the food on our plate. I had the feeling that someone else was eating her food. And when she came to, the plate was empty. To which she said "I wasn't hungry anyway."
She died decades before her husband. I think she didn't have the energy to live. Wouldn't you get worn out if life was a continually "checking out" so that a famous person could come occupy your space? Wouldn't you be tempted to give up and simply try again somewhere else?
Here is the thing: if this scintillating personality Seth was so amazing, why didn't he incarnate and express all these clever things he had to say with his own body? Leaving the body of Jane free to write her own books, to have children, to unfold in a natural way?
The old me would have leapt to defend the sad situation in that house by saying "what is so great about normal?!" I was always championing the unusual and strange and calling it beautiful. In reality, I loved my own crookedness, and any gentle prodding anywhere in the world to move away from the crooked and towards the natural left me feeling attacked.
a personal experience
I met a woman online in a kind of Seth Fan Club on Facebook years ago. She had had astounding past life memories that were so detailed, she finally was able to identify who she had been in a past life: a minor author in Prague in the early part of the 20th century.
Of course, that is to be regarded as wonderful -- at least, I and the rest of that community thought so at the time. However, as she resurrected more and more of the thought, attitudes, favorite music, favorite foods and streets of this dead individual, I wondered, what about her? She is a lovely person, with a husband and kids. Why shouldn't she flourish. Why is it more important that a dead man lives again?
How cold I must be that I would answer "because it is more interesting this way." Unconsciously, I was answering that way, and so was she.
Who the hell am I to think that what is interesting is better than what is good?
I only hope that she buried this man again, and reclaimed her sovereignty. We die for a good reason: we are finished with that particular story. We've done all we can in that incarnation. Sweep us off the stage, we are done!
It is rude to return wearing the same clothes.
The stupidity of an "arc"
People get hooked into this stuff because they like to imagine a "civilizational arc," where humanity strives...bit by bit getting "a little better each day."
I think there is an arc, but it is within each individual. And possibly spread over lifetimes.
If you take that inner sense of an arc, then project it out onto society, you end up supporting ideas that deny other individuals their freedom.
All of us "Seth" supporters denied the right of Jane Roberts to live a full, "ordinary" and good life. Of course Jane was the first jailer here. And why didn't her husband protect her? But we "followers" in the press of our numbers must have done our share to keep her where she was. We believed that it was necessary that "the message get out" that there are other worlds, dimensions, whatever. That humanity was at a crisis point, that the present moment is ripe for this knowledge, and so on.
End result: it is imperative that Jane herself stay quiet so this spirit may use her body to talk to us.
So how do I know this?
I sat with these facts in my mind, and invited Christ in. He said no words. He only looked at me. And I saw the shame and the waste.
I saw that what was truly beautiful is expressed in the "ordinary." I saw the span of an ordinary life, which nonetheless reaches the end with a pool of deep wisdom. I saw that for Jane Roberts. And it made a sad contrast with the way things actually did go.