“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The crisis would have developed on the condition that Ruburt tried to use and develop his spontaneous and intuitive abilities on an adult basis. The cleavage between discipline and spontaneity had long existed; given the all-or-nothing attitude of the personality, there was bound to be a swing, a complete swing from one to the other until the personality learned to combine the two and become more thoroughly integrated.

His necessary job was to combine the two, for in him the intuitions and intellect are both strong. To use his abilities fully both had to operate smoothly and simultaneously, and give each other freedom and elbow room. Old fears would make him gyrate, panic-stricken, from one method of operation to the other.

His abilities, to be used fully, would inevitably have led him to such a crisis point, or better to such a challenge. Any work of art of his, not an apprentice work, would have led him to the same point. Poetry is the exception, for here the necessary integration happened early in his career.

The poetry was not seen as threatening to the disciplined self. Any work of fiction in which his abilities were at all fulfilled would have brought him to this point, and any endeavor such as the psychic work, which was adopted. In other words, for the personality to use its abilities fully that challenge would have had to be faced in every instance but the poetry.

This would have occurred however on the introduction of any strong spontaneous action. The World as Idea Construction came to him, beside its extrasensory origin, subconsciously, with an exploding effect to save him, because he had so put the lid upon his creative activities after Rebellers, that he had effectively blocked the intuitive self.

Of course you played a part. He felt relatively free in his spontaneity in the beginning with you, for he granted you super-human abilities, relying upon what he thought to be almost absolute strength and stability. He did not have to reason, for you would reason for you both.

You therefore would protect him from the results of his own spontaneity, carried too far, for he never thought in terms of a spontaneity tempered by self-discipline. In Florida he saw his father as the epitome of unreason and uncontrolled spontaneity, which had actually become a hodgepodge of unrelated emotional acts, and he felt you then deserting him symbolically.

Here, when you became ill, he saw you were not omnipotent. You could not basically protect him from himself. You had been his in a basic manner, and he saw that you, his director, did not know where to turn. The hidden and bedrock, latent, strong conscientious self then rose up and took over control, and would not give the spontaneous self then back any of the reins.

All your parents frightened him, for he saw them as he saw his own father. Often what passed as spontaneity and emotionalism were often unrelated acts of instinctive nature. What seemed to be freedom or free acts were instead the result of unreasoning propulsion.

He feared his own spontaneity then was the result of unreasoning propulsion, and in his early years certainly some of it had been. He could not differentiate, and feared his spontaneous self the more, and he saw you fear your parents’ behavior.

He doubled his discipline, and tried to put the lid upon the spontaneous self. For some time he confused true spontaneity with acts caused by blind propulsion, so he could not trust his spontaneous nature. Your mother for example says what she thinks often. Ruburt therefore thought she was spontaneous; for a while he did not see the blind panic behind the words or acts.

He identified strongly with both of your parents, for each of them seemed to signify the warring aspects of himself. He identified with each, hating and loving each for that reason. He did not trust you when you told him to free his intuitive self, now, when the symptoms were bad last year, because he felt you did not trust yourself to be spontaneous in your dealings with him. This is just before your own pendulum sessions.

Some of the confusion was the result of Ruburt’s attitudes toward spontaneity and discipline, toward the spontaneous and strongly conscientious aspects of his personality.

The erroneous attitudes had much to do with the difficulties. He thought of the spontaneous self, his spontaneous self, as joyful, free, intensely creative, but also as somewhat evil, frightening, unreasoning, and liable to lead him to disaster.

He thought of the overly conscientious self as stern, good, boring, constricting and uncreative, but very safe. He never made any serious attempt to integrate his personality, or to understand these portions of himself until recent years. He did not understand that discipline can be an aid to creativity, and that the spontaneous self is good. These erroneous attitudes were built up in this life. They echoed however experience in past lives also.

Only the poetry represented neutral ground. On other areas of life the spontaneous became highly suspect in both social and work areas. In his gallery work experience he did his best to disguise his spontaneous nature, out of his own fear and also as a result of your attitude at that time.