“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your condition following your first exercise bout should have showed you how badly you were in need of the treatment. When I suggested that you dissociate I didn’t mean that you should break up in pieces.

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.

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.

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.

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’s strong feeling was correct, his compulsive feeling that you should leave Sayre. At the time a trip to Florida would have been fine, although a meeting with Ruburt’s father on prolonged terms was not a good idea. Had you left Ruburt’s father for Miami you would have done well. Had you, Joseph, offered an alternative to going with Ruburt’s father, Ruburt would have accepted it and you would have done well.

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.