“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You overreacted, but merely along the lines of a learning process to insure that the main areas were not violated. You went too far, both of you, in that direction. All touch, to each of you now, was not innocent or joyful encounter; it meant “How far will this lead, and is the time of the month correct?” This applies to you both. Ruburt desperately wanted you to cherish him as a woman, to play and flirt with him. He wanted you to show even innocent animal affection. At the same time however, implied in any such touches, in his mind also was the question “How far will this go?”

This was the reason for his outrage last night. He had done what both of you wanted, and now everyone was angry at him, including himself—but he felt (underlined) that he had done it mainly to reassure you.

(9:40—9:45. Jane’s trance had been deep, her pace fast, as it was throughout the session. The break was short because we had barely begun to go over the material when Jane said “Wow, I can feel him coming back with some good stuff, so we’d better get ready.”)

Now Ruburt strongly reacted this time positively, when you massaged his leg, because he interprets your feelings toward his symptoms in this manner: you will not comfort his body physically because you do not like it. You tell him to use suggestion, which is a mental tool, and evade the physical contact which to him is proof of the physical divorce, and a reassertion of the mental being valued and the physical denied.

Now too many people enter it. It has become to him a very necessary and important meeting ground between the two of you. Your ideas, our work—and the world at large. It becomes therefore a necessary and important room of communication, but now of communication going out into the world. It loses then that secrecy that has always been important to him.

(“He can always work back here in the studio on mornings and all day Fridays. I’ve told him that many times.” I work all day Friday at Artistic.)

The secrecy also enables him to retreat in anger from you to some extent under the conditions mentioned earlier, and also has much to do with all of this brooding in secret. When he feels closed off from you it is then that he keeps important matters to himself. Because he is talkative this escapes your notice, but he often uses talk as a shield.

In both of you, your feelings toward work and children then are closely connected. Ruburt at that time tried to comfort you as a woman, through caresses, and offering frequent sexual comfort. You repulsed him then, feeling that this would only add to the problem, and he began then to build up this feeling of physical divorce.

It hurt him of course to perform the up and down motions particularly, and he interpreted this to mean that you wanted him to torture and humiliate his body further by forcing it to feel the pain, and that in doing so he was punishing it further. He interpreted this therefore as a punishment of the body, and a mortification in a way of the feminine self.

In a strange fashion the symptoms also served to stress what he felt you were both trying to deny—his femininity, in that he felt at a very unconscious level that they made him helpless and in need of someone to lean upon—a mute call for support to you, and at that level he was outraged that instead of giving him your hand you would offer mental suggestions.

He also to some degree was angry at me, as a male. He partially identified some of my traits with some of yours, so if he was mad at you for telling him, literally to his way of thinking, to hurt himself five times a day by getting up and down from the floor, he was twice as mad at me.

He wanted you to help him get up and down from the floor, and encourage him. He felt instead that you and I were saying in effect: “You have not hurt yourself enough, now do this five times a day, and you will be a good girl,” and this he simply would not do.

I will tell you another of his secrets. In the past, though he knew that he exaggerated, when his legs were bothering him he automatically looked for the nearest available parking place when you were driving. He would never ask you to park close to your destination. He felt it a sign of weakness on his part to even think of it, yet he also felt that on occasion you showed an annoying lack of sympathy or understanding, and at his worst moments he would feel that you purposely chose a place further away—that it was for his own good, you thought, that he face the humiliation in realizing in what poor condition he was. This would automatically cause all kinds of symptoms, needless to say.

He did not feel you sympathized with him at all on a physical level, and he felt that his and your attitudes of dealing with the whole matter mentally through suggestion, was a way of further implementing the difficulty—the physical divorce.

He has been much more comfortable when he is alone in the mornings and you are at work, because he feels you do not see him at his worst. This is one of the main reasons why he seems to have such great difficulty in getting up in the mornings during the week; where at least he felt he could arise with some dignity alone, and if he was a mess you would not be there to reprove him.

Weekend mornings you are here to observe. Then to top it off, following his subconscious reasoning here, for he has scarcely been aware of this, you would not only observe him, but to his way of thinking, force him to make a public spectacle of his condition. He went through all kinds of pretenses, smiling when he tried to go down the stairs, trying to tell himself that it did not hurt, and far too upset to make use of the unending line of positive suggestions he tried frantically to give himself.