“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Good evening, Seth. What do you think of my performance last night?”)

At times the ego can hold you in a tight vice, which the dissociation breaks. This is what happened after your exercises. You have been doing very well, for you, in allowing yourself psychic freedom. However conscious fears cause the ego to tighten its grasp and some effects of this nature were starting up again. This is why I suggested that you begin these exercises now. The fact that the fearful ego was beginning to tighten explains your reaction to the exercises. The ego can build up around the subconscious vitality like a glacier, and these exercises melt it away. Even the prickles in your neck are like tiny picks chipping away at icy fears.

If you will remember what you know of the trance state, you are for example in a light trance, able to maintain awareness of yourself, your environment and your place in it. You simply behave somewhat differently, not bestirring yourself in any direction unless the suggestion to do so be given you.

In drawing up his list of so-called natural laws, I have said that man decided that what appeared to be cause and effect to him was therefore a natural law of the universe. Not only do these so-called laws, which are not laws, vary according to where you are in the universe, they also vary according to what you are in the universe. Therefore your tree recognizes a human being, though it does not see the human being in your terms. To a tree the laws are simply different. And if a tree wrote its laws of the universe, then you would know how different they are.

This is what the ego does when it reacts too violently to purely physical data on your plane. As a result it stiffens and you have, my well-meaning friend, the cold detachment with which you have faced the world. I do not want to digress here. I have certain points in mind for this evening. Nevertheless lest Ruburt thinks he is getting off scot-free, let me remind him that the tree’s bark is quite necessary, cannot be dispensed with—but I will get into that and into Ruburt at a later time.

The idea of dissociation could be likened to the slight distance between the bark and the inside of the tree. Here we do not have a rigid bark, as you should not have a rigid ego. We have instead a flexible bark, changing with the elements, protecting the inner tree or the inner self, but flexible, opening up or closing in rhythmic motion. The bark is so to speak outside our tree; and there is a small space between the inner tree and the bark. This small space is our dissociation.

Do you want to sit in the rocker?

Your work is improving and will improve constantly. It may seem, or it did seem, unreasonable to you that personality had much to do with so-called advancement in the artistic world. And yet people sense your attitude toward them very strongly.

You may take a break. If you do not mind, after the break I will continue for a short while. I am trying very hard, Joseph, because dissociation will answer more than one of your particular problems, and practical ones at that. Associations which you may consider impractical are often very practical. I always feel when I speak along these lines as if I must say over and over that I do not intend any shortening of your working hours, only that you have more energy than you realize and that associations, as certainly you must see with your landlord, are often practical. Take your break.

The opportunity was waiting. I do not tell you this to make you feel badly, only to show you once again that you should trust your impulses, because in your particular case your ego has overbuilt its defenses.

Ruburt sensed the growing explosion with your parents, sensed the frigid growth of your ego, and impulsively had to do something. Had you not left at all circumstances would have been far worse in any case, and your parents might have suffered another, but this time fatal, accident. Ruburt of course did not know this in practical terms but he knew it nevertheless.

(Nor did I understand what was happening, beyond the obvious fact that she was coming to hate the job. I was doing some samples for a business venture with a relative that offered a chance of rather handsome monetary rewards if successful; our agreement was that Jane would hold a temporary job in the meantime.

The situation would have been much worse. Ruburt was overly weary, and if I may say so, bleary. He would have tried to make a serious mistake at this time. In pity and against his own intuition, he would have tried to move in with your parents. You would have both attempted to support them, with disastrous psychic effects. There is little more I would like to say here. I promise you that neither of you will feel any poor results from tonight’s long session. Please do take a break.

By this time Ruburt-Jane was so confused that he would have taken the radio position in Elmira, and here again this would have been an error. In fact Joseph, and I do not say this to make you feel better but because it is the truth, you literally saved her life.

I would suggest that you keep up a closer correspondence with your younger brother on a personal basis, and I suggest this rather strongly. I would also suggest that you visit your younger brother much more frequently than you have in the past, and indeed that you do not let more than two months go by before you visit him for a weekend. Unlike you and Loren, he does not have a strongly developed ego core to protect him. He is somewhat like a snail without a shell, and could benefit strongly by your affection, shown in a more practical manner.

Your father somewhat resented your seemingly magical projections of reality into paintings, since he worked futilely in the realm of material inventions and got nowhere. He also, to a much greater degree than you, never trusted his instincts, although they were very strong. Your mother had much to do with this and so did his own mother.

I do wish to show you how things happen or almost happen. There are always clear reasons, though not necessarily clear causes. Loren is as lucky in his way with his wife as you are in yours. I will go into Ruburt’s background later. It does not have as immediate implications however since she, or he, has erected his own barriers along these lines, and the parents are not so involved as far as distance is concerned. Ruburt, or Jane, amputated the present mother for necessity’s sake and for survival’s sake.