“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

And good evening to our friend. I do have some remarks for you and I hope that they will be helpful. You must remember to hold your head up. You should know better than to cower when you come here. I have no whip; and I would not use one if I had one. You are not sure enough of your own abilities or of your own worth. You cannot drive through physical life in the same way that you drive your car down the highway. You shall indeed, get traffic tickets and of a different kind, only you yourself give yourself tickets. You cannot force reality to give you what you want. You cannot manipulate events for egotistical purposes. You can manipulate events and you can manipulate them for your own egotistical purposes; but when you do so, you give yourself a traffic ticket. You must want what is best for your own development and the development of others rather than specifically determining what you think consciously is better for you and then trying to force or coerce fate to get this for you. If you want what is best for your own development and what is best for the development of others, then you shall attain it. It shall come to you effortlessly. I am leading up to certain issues here. You are not always aware of what is best for you on a conscious level. Often the person that you think you want or need is not the person you want or need on other levels. When you drive your car you often attempt to speed through reality as quickly as you can, and you are pleased with yourself as the driver of the vehicle. You like driving because you feel that it gets you where you want to go and quickly, and you do not mind breaking a few small rules of the road in the process. Now the small rules that you break, are indeed, minute ones. It is not that you break a specific rule; it is the attitude that allows you to break the rule; and this applies to other roads beside the physical highway. You want to get to your destination too quickly. The destination is within you. You do not have to go any place to get that destination; and it is only when you think that that destination lies elsewhere that you allow yourself to go astray. Your identity is within you and do not look for it in others. This is perhaps the strongest point of my message to you this evening, the one I would have you take to heart. When you realize that your own identity is within you will not spend energy seeking to find yourself in others. Others cannot give you a sense of worth; this is your own. Any lack is your own lack. I may perhaps deal with more specific issues this evening. But I will not discuss them until these points have been made.

Now you have indeed been doing well. And I do congratulate you. You are too impatient both with your own development and the development of others. You want your destination now and you want to get to that destination as quickly as possible, 85-95 miles a minute, you see. You have given yourself several traffic tickets. Now, you have learned a good deal, and I know that you have tried. It does no good to understand issues intellectually, however, or even to understand them intuitively unless you understand them so thoroughly that they become a part of your daily life. Much that you know you have made a part of your life, but you still wish to use your knowledge for your own conscious purposes. You are still not willing to say let me develop as I should develop. You are still saying let me develop as I think I should develop. The I being a highly egotistical I. You are still saying, let me develop as I want to develop. You are still saying I want this person or I want that person or that thing. Therefore shall I use this ability and this knowledge to gain it. And that is why you have given yourself a traffic ticket now and then, What you are learning is a technique for self-development. You cannot use it, therefore, to attain those things that do not pertain to your own self-development and the techniques will not help you get something that you were not meant to have nor that you have before decided as an entity that you should not have. I will leave specifics for later. Nevertheless, the facts remain that your own inner self and your own entity have given you challenges that you have accepted. Now you know these challenges; subconsciously you are aware of them. Consciously you do not want to accept them and this is one reason why you have had difficulty with the pendulum. This is not out of the ordinary. This happens to many personalities. It is nothing to blame yourself for. You are certainly in the midst of a certain line of development. You cannot blame yourself for not being further along the line. The very fact that you are here this evening, the very fact that you are trying as hard as you have been shows that you are indeed developing and that you are indeed learning. There must be an open-minded, an openhearted attitude here. You must not try to use what you have learned in a narrow, limiting way. This hampers your own development. It closes your eyes to many possibilities that will be important to you. It is natural, perhaps, to want to use what you have learned, this information, as a technique to achieve what you at any particular time think desirable, a particular person, a particular thing. But what is important is the inner development. If this is taken care of, it will automatically lead you to the person that is best for you and to the circumstances that will help you develop. To insist that a specific individual or a specific goal be attained through these methods is limiting. There must always be the acknowledgement that you do not consciously as yet realize the depths of yourself, the goals you have set and the challenges, and this material should be used to open up your inner horizons and to lead you in those directions toward which your inner self has already set you. If you then egotistically, say—No—this particular situation is what I want, then you may be blocking the inner direction which has been meant for you. I said I would discuss some particular material and so I shall shortly. But the inner attitude is far more important. I suggest, Joseph, that you take a break and I shall continue.

([Pat:]I had been terrified of my father for the first 19 years of my life. Indeed, I never saw my father as a person but rather as a dark shadow with a club. My father had a temper that was aimed at us children and at my mother. [Yet my father is a very loving person. I know that now. We are very close, now. I love my father deeply. He has mellowed in his attitude toward my youngest sister, also.] We got spanked when we misbehaved, which is something I’ve always been ashamed to admit to others. I didn’t want my friends to know my father spanked us. I wanted my family to be a happy one. I was always afraid to bring friends home for fear my mother and father might argue and embarrass me. Also, I didn’t think my dad wanted us to bring friends home.

Now this also overshadows your relationship with the males to whom you have come in contact. For you have been, on the one hand, terrified of them, and on the other hand wanted a normal relationship. Give me a moment here —on the one hand you desire more from a relationship with a man than you have any right to expect. No human being could ever deliver what you expect a man to deliver in a relationship. This is because you see the male in terms inspired in you when you were a child. You were terrified of the male, your father. On the other hand, you felt that he did contain wisdom, truth, almost godlike qualities. These qualities you attempt to project into the male that you meet. At the same time you are also terrified because of this background. No man can possibly be as godlike as your inner conception. Therefore, each man is bound to disappoint you. At the same time, you hope and pray subconsciously that the man will disappoint you because this male in your mind has godlike qualities that attract you; on the other, you see him as all powerful and as one who gives out punishment and one who is unreasoning and cruel because you felt that your father was cruel. You are afraid, so to speak, to come under a man’s thumb for this reason, to come under his domination. For to do so is to place yourself in a humble position and a frightening position underneath the male figure. Your terror as a child gave you an inner idea of reality and family group whereby you saw yourself completely powerless and helpless under the domination of this father figure. He was the source of all and yet he could at the same time take all away. And you felt, at the same time, that he would indeed do so. Because you were a male in past lives, you resented this all the more strongly. Give us a moment.

You need help and you have asked for it. Therefore, I will give you what information I have. Now, there was an afternoon, I believe when you were nearly three. Your father was home in the afternoon. They were in the bedroom, your mother and your father. You were taking a nap. Your parents were in the act of making love. You awoke. Your mother cried out. This is far from an unusual occurrence; it happens frequently. You interpreted her cry as one of helplessness and frustration and your father had hurt her. You came into the room; your father jumped up and chased you away.

You have been afraid that the male would hurt you cruelly—and on purpose, and at the same time, you have endowed him with godlike qualities, and, therefore, demanded more than any man could possibly deliver. I am sure that you realize that when you drive your car, you see yourself in a masculine role, as one of power and strength and one in which you consider yourself invulnerable. Now you are not invulnerable in that car. The reason that you feel invulnerable is that you are subconsciously identifying with this godlike figure and it could lead you into difficulty. Now you have on occasion been cruel to men you have known rather purposely, intending to hurt them before you could be hurt. When you have settled yourself upon a particular man, you see, it becomes a matter of principle with you that you get him. Oh, it does indeed. On the one hand, you want him, on the other hand, as you had to escape from your father, you must also escape from the man and so you are caught in a dilemma. You want him. On the other hand, you must feel that you have independence from him. There was never any communication between you and your father. Therefore, you find it difficult to communicate verbally with a male.

You are not able, at this point, you have never been able to look at a man as an individual human being. You have not seen him as he is, for you have endowed him with all these qualities of which I have told you, and with all the fears that go with them. In the overall then, you deny yourself the experience of really knowing an individual male, for you will not see him as he is. The man realizes, of course, that you do not see him as he is, and each one of the men involved has resented it subconsciously. You do not communicate with an individual man; you communicate with your idea of what this man is, this man with the godlike qualities that can bring both joy and punishment.

Now I will tell you the material that I have given you will help you and you should listen to it often. It should make one thing clear. Your Mr. Reed is not Mr. Reed’s Mr. Reed. You are not seeing the man as he is. You are seeing the image that you have projected upon him, and no one can live up to that image. I realize that when you discuss him that you say—I know he has failings. This is to assure yourself that, after all, the male is not so all powerful. But you do not see this man’s good points or failings clearly. Some of the qualities that you imagine in him as virtues are not and some of the qualities that you imagine to be failings are not failings. You will never have any relationship with the Dick Reed that you have projected upon a living human being. You may have a relationship with that human being, but there is a world of difference between that human being and the imagined image of him to which you react. And it is that image that you see when you look at him and when think of him. That imagined image is real in your mind, it is reality. But you cannot project that image upon another human being and deny him his own reality. You have no chance in a thousand lives of having a relationship with the man you think of as being Dick Reed, because you cannot have a two-way relationship with an image that is one-sided and has no flesh. Now give us a moment. While we are beginning a job, we may as well do a good one.

We have only dealt with one side of this relationship. Now this Mr. Reed has his own part to play. And his purposes and your purposes to this point have fit together beautifully, for neither of you have seen the other. He has seen his image of you. For his own reasons, he has not allowed himself to know an individual woman. And he does not want to know an individual woman physically—he does not want to. Give us a moment.

One point, you see, this artificial image that you have projected upon others has prevented you from knowing them, and in itself has prevented any legitimate relationship which might otherwise have occurred. As long as you allow this image to cover your eyes, you do not see the individual man and do not react to him for the image is between the two of you. Now you have frightened our young man. On the one hand he resents the image that you have placed upon him, and on the other hand it serves his vanity to accept it. He would much rather have you think of him as this image. He is hiding himself and you have very nicely given him an image to hide behind. You speak to each other in symbols and writing and poetry. You are using the symbols to escape normal human give and take. They are not symbols to aid in communication; they are symbols behind which you hide from communicating.

Let our friend Ruburt and that one (Rob) take a brief break. I do not need a break.

([Pat:] “I guess that we are using one another. I suppose… that neither one of us sees the other person for what we are. He hides behind the God image that I project upon him … he’s trying to hide, and, of course, that’s a perfect image to hide behind.”

([Rob:] “Now if either one of you had mentioned that, it would have been a big help at the time.” During an earlier visit.

Now, ordinary adult responsibilities, you see, would take him away from these two individuals and so he has taken steps to see that he is not involved. Give us a moment. He is more bound to one of these persons than the other for one was a younger brother. He was extremely religious in his past life and the love of music connected with the church is reflected here. His name was strange, I am not too clear on this. The family name in the past: Achman. (Pat learned that Dick’s family has an Ackerman branch in June 1968.) The first portion like oxtagon.

([Pat:] “One that would be beneficial to the two of us and in developing those abilities that we should develop.”)

Now, Ruburt wants me to help him with voice control. You are so used to the image that you have projected outward that you are uncomfortable when you try to face a situation nakedly without the image. You project the image on one specific individual so strongly. You also project it in any of your relationships, as a rule, with men who are older than yourself. You do not want to or had not wanted to face even a transient relationship with a man because you did not then have time, you see, to project this image in any dependable manner. There was also a gap when you would have to face the individual as he was. This made you uncomfortable and defiant because it forced you, however briefly, to meet another individual eye to eye. It goes without saying that you could not see whatever good qualities there were in any man you knew casually. You did not have time to project the image upon him, and you were afraid to see clearly without it. Practice in such relationships would allow you to get used to an environment without this image. If not giant steps, baby steps, each such encounter being a small exercise in seeing another male individual without your image glasses on.