“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You will have to let me handle this in my own way—the matter of your symptoms and Ruburt’s knees, but for a starter we will begin with you. The pain in your side was a reaction against the first group of symptoms—they gave you a pain in the side. You were angry at yourself for not feeling well.

Now it was on the one hand feigned behavior, but the symptoms had to be bothersome enough or they would not have served their purpose. To some extent verbal communication was also minimized. Your “condition” effectively kept Ruburt from making any demands, or from putting any verbal pressure upon you, for he rushed of course to your support.

Beside this you thought sometimes that Ruburt thought of nothing but himself, and you were saying “Look at me, I am no superman,” and so actually you were looking for communications that it seemed you did not want in the early part of the cycle.

His attempt to have you encourage him up and down and running, is a not-too-well disguised attempt for further emotional involvement on your part. He would be as upset as you over a smothering closeness. However often he simply feels lonely—not necessarily for your physical presence, for you are often in the house, but for emotional recognition that you are apt to forget about.

Your personality structures simply respond at times of course to different stimuli. Both of you can learn to modify these characteristics, but understanding them is basic. Ruburt responds, generally, to people. One reason of course for the classes, and their success. But behind Ruburt’s outgoing characteristics you run into some rather restrictive ones that are more on the surface, generally speaking, in your personality.

Once someone gets through your surface restrictive tendencies, obvious ones, then your spontaneity flows to the surface. Once someone gets through Ruburt’s open spontaneous characteristics they are apt to wonder what happened, because he will often not let them get any further. (A very acute pair of points.) Hence the fact that his students remain students as a rule, and not personal friends. As you know, those who get through all the way find a bedrock loyalty. But the spontaneous emotional character warms up, brightens, and refreshes what can be a morose inner self at times. Therefore your emotional response to him is important for that reason.

You have not been able to ignore him since he had his symptoms. You might be angry at him, in which case there was a definite emotional response, or disgusted; he thought in the past, the dim past, disgusted enough to leave him—but you could not ignore him.

It was during your illness that he began to watch your face for a hint of your mood and feelings—a tendency he has relinquished only lately. The physical signs of improvement have been most beneficial to him, forcing him to recognize that betterment is not only possible but has occurred.

The knees seemed all the more obvious by contrast, and to some extent then he focused upon them. He sees the two of you together, doing your own thing, but emotionally in rich interaction. This is what he wants.

(There is some element of truth in the above; but also I feel that Jane would rather I wait until she has the book typed up perhaps halfway before I begin to read it. I can change this idea. I had the idea she would rather I didn’t interfere with the gestation of her books—at least this is the way my reading of them seems to have worked out in the past.)

The knees are a symbol of the problems of course still remaining. He enjoyed your massaging them, but he did not want to ask you to do so, for he saw it as a sign of emotional giving on your part that must be spontaneous, and not asked for or demanded.

The morning situation can be handled from any of numerous standpoints, but they should be emotional standpoints. He can imagine himself up ahead of you, as he thought of, surprising you with your breakfast already prepared. That is one solution. It would help if you kissed him in the morning, and made some emotional supportive gesture that also encouraged him to get up.

At the risk of being repetitive: if he concentrates upon his work, the morning issue will take care of itself, and by work I mean not only his writing, but his own individual psychic endeavors. He measures what he does daily against what you do daily, and feels automatically guilty if you do more than he, or even if he is doing watercolors while you are typing a session.

He still feels guilty about you going to work in the morning, and not getting up just rubs his nose in it further. He is saying “I may not have to go out to work like you do, but I am punishing myself for it, so do not blame me.”