“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment here. I want to emphasize the importance of your personal relationship to each other, and mention the ways in which it affects your work. I may as well give you some idea of how these overall patterns operate within your lives, since we have a good beginning, and while we are on the subject.

When your relationship becomes uneasy to a certain degree, then this impedes the spontaneity that you allow yourself in your paintings. You are at that point trying to shove beneath awareness certain feelings of yours, mentioned in our last session. You are, say, close to the point on noncontact. Inhibited feelings therefore are at their strongest on your part. Considerable energy is used to continue the repression as the pressure from beneath grows.

What neither of you sufficiently (underlined) understood was the strong interrelationship between your personal lives and your work. You were aware of it but you did not understand, generally speaking, that your relationship must be actively and positively enjoyable on a daily basis, if both of you are to produce the work that you want.

You were apt to put the personal relationship last, or rather to let it go, so that often it seemed to come after everything else. Now it is true that withheld sexual energy can be diverted to creative aims, but in your cases it was the feeling of daily emotional nourishment that was sometimes lacking.

When you closed off and retreated to compensate, you came closer to the people with whom you work, enjoying their safer emotional contact. It was not threatening, you see. At the same time you adopted a more hard line in your relationship with those in the family, trying to avoid all emotional situations which might trigger a release of the repressed feelings.

This would cause considerable panic on your part. On the other hand of course Ruburt also expected you to come up with and initiate the noncontact behavior when he felt that your relationship was getting too close for comfort, that his physical love for you might lead him some time to neglect consciously or unconsciously proper contraceptive behavior.

Ruburt began to overreact more and more, and felt the invisible pull physically. The near and too-far boundaries were uncompromising and arbitrary. A division of responsibility for your relationship was far less satisfactory. The two of you instead now should concentrate your efforts upon forming a generalized, comfortable center, and maintaining that. This will put the concentration of attention in constructive areas, upon warmth and mutual understanding rather than putting the burden of the relationship first on one and then on the other.

When Ruburt feels comfortable in your relationship he is much more predisposed to cook and to eat. The kitchen once more becomes a sacred place of nourishment to him, and the food that he prepares is much more nourishing to your bodies, because of his attitude and its results upon the atoms and molecules composing the food.

You were therefore expected by him to keep the sessions from getting out of hand, to help in quotes “police” his spontaneous self here, as you did in the sexual area and in your personal relationship. To him this was logical, if subconscious, expectation.

He then got into the habit of checking the spontaneous self at every point, and setting up opposing muscular reactions and tensions. It was simply not possible for me to give you more information at that time than I could. It was precisely, you see, the relationship between spontaneity and discipline operating between yourselves, that was projected upon the sessions, and inhibited any spontaneous comments I could make.

You had always counted upon him to be freely spontaneous, and could not understand his reactions. When you told him to be spontaneous he was all the more confused. Earlier in both of your minds, Ruburt was the spontaneous part of the relationship, hence for many reasons the unpredictable element. You were the discipline element, the reasoning part. Neither of you were fully willing to work out these seemingly (underlined) contradictory elements of your own personalities. For of course your personality has some strongly spontaneous and intuitive elements, as you now know, and Ruburt also has very definite, now too definite, tendencies toward discipline.

In general Ruburt is more easily spontaneous, for example. Over the years you simply did not allow enough leeway for yourselves, but the overall tendencies are perfectly legitimate. They operate quite obviously, also in your relationship with the world at large. You can put up with noncontact comparatively speaking far better than Ruburt, and will be the first one to draw the line here. As in the other areas mentioned, the more personal ones.