“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This has to do with the attack made on Ruburt by your domestic cat. Several issues are involved: Ruburt’s own mood at the time, for one thing. Now. The cat senses both of your moods immediately. It is psychically very close to you both. Being a house cat, it is closed in with you. As a rule you both radiate strong constructive energy. For a short period of time, Ruburt turned his creative energy, as he knows, I believe, inward rather than outward, knotted it up, misdirected it, did not focus it properly, and turned it into destructive energy.

Now. Ruburt would not turn any destructive energy loose upon you, my dear friend, for he loves you too deeply. He is too mature now to turn such destructive energy inward in a strong manner, against his own organism. He would not willfully turn such energy loose even upon an animal.

Usually his aggressive feelings are automatically sublimated into his work. He grapples with ideas and with words. The destructive energy however found no outlet. It therefore took the point of least resistance, and he quite subconsciously of course projected it upon his pet. It was not that he actually focused the energy purposely upon the cat, merely that the cat’s spongelike psychic nature received it full force.

There is much more here. However he began his creative life very early as an outlet, you see, for aggressive and violent feelings. As an infant and a young child he had a strong temper, which terrified him, and he indulged in childish tantrums. Children know much more than they are given credit for.

The child even then realized that violence and aggression was somehow connected with his mother’s illness. He also, that is Ruburt also, felt the violence that is a part of his father’s personality. Suddenly the tantrums ceased. He held them back in pure terror of the consequences, for suddenly the violent-tempered mother was immobile. He feared the same fate. The father had completely disappeared. To the child the father simply vanished from the face of the earth, an equally fearful fate.

(Break at 9:32. Jane was as well dissociated, she said, as she has ever been: “He had me so that I was more him than me… Now, how did he do that?” She could have been talking about a stranger, she continued, yet knew what she was saying and that she talked about herself.

Now. It has always been extremely difficult for him to defend himself physically. As a child he simply would not do so, and to make matters worse the mother taunted him for being a coward.

That he finally defended himself against her, defended himself against her emotionally and psychically, is all the more astounding. The main reason that he does not see her is not because he fears her, but because he fears the violence in himself that he has never dared direct toward her.

He projects it so that it seems to originate in the mother. At the same time the mother experiences unrecognized feelings of violence against the daughter, that she has never been able to express in physical terms.

I am trying to explain this rather thoroughly, for once he realizes these connections he will not need to fear this quite human and natural aggressiveness. It only turns into violence, and into a fear of violence, when it is so meticulously denied.

Ruburt knew this well. He has since grown to like all animals but at the moment of the attack, you see, the cat instantly became this personification of evil to him, and again his primary concern was to flee. There was never an instant in the whole affair when he thought of striking back.

He does not see his mother because he imagines subconsciously that he is protecting her from his own violence against her, lest after all these years it might erupt. Now this is ridiculous. This restrained violence has been excellently used for creative purposes.

When he was not docile as a child there was vicious instant retaliation of a most complicated nature. There was ordinary retaliation, in that he was punished through word attacks, and through such corporal punishment as the invalid could give. But, and here Joseph we come to the real heart of the matter, the mother retaliated in the main not by a direct attack upon the child, but by causing the child to believe that its misbehavior could be, and very nearly was, going to result in the death of the mother. As any child does, the child at times wished for the parent’s death, and here we see the mother acting out her own death in order to punish the child.

When this builds up and enough small legitimate injustices are borne, docilely, then we have an explosion of a sorts. Everyone else you see has a right to gripe, he feels subconsciously, but he cannot. He is terrified to do so. When he manages to do so he is jubilant out of all proportion. His swearing you see allows him leeway.

Now these emotional confessions of Ruburt’s annoy you considerably. They are not necessary. However your annoyance can be tempered with somewhat more understanding, and this in itself will tend to minimize their occurrence. When he indulges in this sort of thing he is feeling rebellious, you see, and this is a result of the built-up aggressive feelings of which I have been speaking.

Subconsciously he feels that you are saying shut up, and this angers, humiliates and bewilders him. He struggles against such disclosures to begin with. Instead you see methods can be used to direct the emotions in other channels. You can get him to talk about other matters by asking for example about what he has written for the day. The subject chosen by you must be one in which he is immensely interested however. He will understand that you are merely trying to redirect him, and will not feel that you are restraining his freedom to say what he wants to say. He will understand what you are doing, but that is all right. He knows the emotional situation with your mother, and will not object.

Now I will leave you both, and I hope you will see that I have done you both a service, for this is my intention. The storm with Ruburt has passed, and you have both learned much because of it. It is a minor storm indeed, compared to what would have occurred some years earlier. He does not move furniture as erratically as he did, and is learning despite this to use his energies constructively.

There is a man who wears a hat in his office who will be connected with one of these books. It is a characteristic of his. He is perhaps 46, but he is definitely between 46 and 56. (Pause.) There is a G  connected with him.