“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Fear of course was the motive behind this iron discipline. In the last life, as a medium, he had swung somewhat to the other side again, deliberately not using his intellect and giving the spontaneous portions full play. He was open-hearted, rather childishly vain, the emotional pattern quickly moving from joy to tears.

Other portions of the personality, while recognizing this, still felt that the personality as a whole needed to impose some restraints upon what it regarded as flamboyantly spontaneous qualities. Therefore it chose a highly restrictive early environment. It chose a parent whose emotions were highly unrestrained, so that the parent’s action could serve as a constant reminder of its own flamboyant emotions.

It chose an environment where hardship would automatically teach a certain discipline, and yet one in which the psychic nature of the circumstances would also permit intuitive creative growth. In fact the controls were applied precisely in proportion to the intuitive gifts. The purpose was to set up a situation in which both strong facets of the personality could emerge; the intellectual, reasoning, rather practical and controlling aspects, hand in hand with the highly volatile creative spontaneous portions.

The religious element in one way or another has always been a strong one. It has at one time or another in various lives been on the side of the strongly disciplined portions, in which case it was greatly given to dogma, and concerned with cultural problems of punishment and law; or followed the intuitive side, in which it emerged as mediumship, and high mysticism.