“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You chose ahead of time therefore to be driven along certain directions. Now. Both of you decided that you would give your lives to creative work. Both of you decided that you would have no children, not only because this fit in with the first goal, but because the energy connected with family life would go into your creative productions, would be saved and available when you began to embark upon the psychic work for which you had also planned.

As you know, again, it is far easier for you not to have children, regardless of all strains. Many people would find it impossible. You are determined not to have them at all cost. You have at different times adopted different methods and adjustments, but your physical relationship has been structured not around mutual pleasure but instead about the fear of having children.

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?”

You both felt that the most innocent of caresses could destroy the foundation of your lives. This was certainly overcompensation. It tended for a while to erode your relationship, and to some extent to set portions of yourselves against other portions. It drove Ruburt at times to try to deny womanhood, to assure you and herself that her body would not betray you both. He would not have his periods—thus he would show both of you, symbolically, that you need not fear his body, since it obviously was not functioning as a woman’s should.

These ambiguous feelings on both of your parts have much to do with the penis reaction. It does not dare shoot a straight line. (Half humorously.) At the same time that these sexual feelings operated, the two of you have an extremely powerful psychic bond, and a hidden but definite sense of inner identity.

The magnetism is both from past life experiences, and set up ahead of time in this life, so that the both of you would be drawn together and held together, despite the fact of no personal family, no children as a common interest.

The sense of loyalty was anchored in you, and you both decided upon it before this existence. Therefore you may sense in Ruburt at times confusing inclinations toward high independence in one area, and a self-denying dependence in another. Because he is presently a woman he will react strongly and aggressively if he feels you are drawing too far apart, for this would threaten your life and goals as much as children would—children in your minds being coming too close together. So you have been constantly between the two poles.

Now. For those reasons you felt most threatened when Ruburt broke in upon your painting time for intimate relations in the past. This symbolically highlighted the whole affair, and brought it too close to consciousness for either of your comforts.

Your before-class activities were decided upon because you knew they could not last too long. Now Ruburt chose, as a woman, to have this strong magnetic feeling toward you, and while the same drives pull you both, because he is a woman this time he is, far more than you, sensitive to the lack or ordinary physical endearment. This leads us to a difference in your reactions to these problems.

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 when Ruburt senses a strong disruption in these main areas he will act up, and strongly. He is trying to see to it, as you are, that your primary purposes are held to. Both of you intuitively realize that your work, both creative and psychic, is bound up in your relationship, for Ruburt helped to bring out in you the freedom to paint, as you knew ahead of time he would.

(“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.)

Now. When you were working full time some years ago at Artistic your fears that Ruburt would become pregnant became an obsession. You were already breaking one of your directives, you see, in working full time at other pursuits, and so you became twice as frightened that you would fall into the world’s familiar mold, have children in which case the job would become indispensable.

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.

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.