“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

This is an unbending conscious pose of the ego, and not to be confused with the lithe subconscious detachment which is actually warm, flexible and expansive. That is, it can contain within it many elements, acknowledge them but be not affected by bad or negative suggestions or elements.

Man’s ego causes him to interpret everything else in the light of himself. He loses very much in this manner. The ego is definitely an advancement, but it can be compared to the bark of the tree in many ways. The bark of the tree is flexible, extremely vibrant, and grows with the growth beneath. It is a tree’s contact with the outer world, the tree’s interpreter, and to some degree the tree’s companion.

So should man’s ego be. When man’s ego turns instead into a shell, when instead of interpreting outside conditions it reacts too violently against them, then it hardens, becomes an imprisoning form that begins to snuff out important data, and to keep enlarging information from the inner self. The purpose of the ego is protective. It is also a device to enable the inner self to inhabit the physical plane. It is in other words a camouflage.

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.

The inner tree continues to grow because the bark is flexible. Man lets his ego face the outer world as does the tree bark, and this is its purpose. Nevertheless the inner self, like the inner tree, must have room to expand. The tree bark makes allowances for good weather (here Jane pounded the table) though bad weather is repulsive to the bark. Nevertheless the bark makes whatever adjustments are necessary and is flexible. Forgive me if this is a trite analogy, I almost hate to say it, but it bends with the wind. It does not bend when there is no wind. Nor does it solidify, stopping the flow of sap to the treetop for fear the dumb tree, not knowing what it was up to, would bump its head against the sky.

Neither should the ego react so violently that it remembers and reacts to past storms in the midst of clear and sunny weather. You can understand this analogy, Joseph. You know that such a tree bark would be death to the tree. What you must still understand is that the same applies to yourself.

We come again to the problem of practicality, and at the risk of repeating myself let me say that in the past Ruburt’s seeming impracticality has been more practical than your intellectual practicality. This is merely because you have not trusted your ego’s ability to offer adequate protection. You have forced it into anxiety so that it overcompensates trying to protect you, and ends up half choking you to death.

For instance, this experience in psychic phenomena would seem to be simply an enjoyable, enlightening, but purely impractical happening. If you were as ego bound as you were last year, you would not have had either the time nor energy nor even the inclination for it. It would not have seemed practical.

The confident inner self will let the ego manipulate in the physical world, but will not allow it to become fiercely overprotective. Your work contains the strength of your inner self in many ways. Your particular ego’s function is to show this work to the world as you know it. I hesitate, and I mean this, to offer practical advice to one who tries to be so practical. But my dear Joseph, there is no true practicality in smothering your abilities by working in a position where you cannot use your abilities. You will not be paid for abilities you cannot use, since I know you must think in financial terms. Your ego’s job is to help you trade your true abilities for your daily bread.

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.

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.