“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.

They deal with finer distinctions than you know now, being somewhat of the nature of your body’s ability to sense another person’s aggression. As your body senses temperature changes so it also senses the psychic charge not only of other human beings but also, believe it or not, of animals, and to a lesser extent it senses the psychic charge of plants and vegetative matter. Your tree builds up a composite of sensations of this sort, sensing not the physical dimensions of a material object, whatever it is, but the vital psychic formation within and about it.

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 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.

Dick, being so much younger, saw no reason why he should be able to compete. He identified with you and loved you. His wife is a great help to him, but so far he has not fully developed his intellectual capacities, for many reasons, and he has a tendency to blame her for it. Outside of your mother who left her mark very strongly on you, you have been the dominant active psychic member of your family, exerting very strong influence on all.