“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The spontaneity is considered safe along certain lines, but these lines become narrowed, and the further the situation continues the more narrowed the area of spontaneity allowed in your work. In the past this has caused a tendency toward overreliance on technique. Do you follow me?

Now give us a moment. When the point is reached of which I had just spoken, your objectivity comes foremost in your work at the expense of spontaneity. Remember some time ago I mentioned your feeling about oils and the emotions. This is in keeping you see with the fact that you felt more threatened than Ruburt at those boundary-near-contact points. At such times you became more alarmed working with your oils and colors, and wanted a retreat, and sought for greater distance in your paintings.

He would have become instantly alarmed had you not then begun to retreat. This has been a highly formal, ritualized behavior pattern, a psychological dance, so formalized on a subconscious level that it left little leeway for spontaneity, and threatened to freeze you both in highly unconscious regimented behavior. He was to keep you from getting too far apart. You were to keep you from getting too close, and when certain automatic points were approached you both went into your act. For some time the behavior worked. The spontaneity was gradually squeezed out to such a degree that it lost its workability, and both of you were beginning to consider making adjustments. You did not understand the pattern, however. You ran into the invisible danger points and reacted in the old ways.

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.

Instead you see, you felt with some considerable exceptions that in this particular area spontaneity could be safely followed. When you encouraged the sessions in the beginning so strongly, he was taken back for to him you were not fulfilling the implied role. When you urged him onward then he felt that he might be on dangerous ground, for you had been counted upon in the personal area to stop spontaneity, emotionally and sexually.

He mistrusted your permissiveness then. It frightened him. If you could not be counted upon, who could? So he began to build up restrictive tendencies of his own. Before you had handled the spontaneity for him. It was your role. He had handled the other end.

He was unused to setting himself up against his own spontaneity so strongly, yet when you did show signs of drawing the line, say, at fear of spontaneous sessions fairly early in the game, he felt on the one hand relieved, and on the other angry at giving up this new prerogative.

Your inner feelings toward each other have been projected onto your feelings toward the sessions, and psychic work also, then. You became annoyed at him, wondering why the spontaneous woman had suddenly turned so restrictive. You did not understand that this was because you had not carried through the personal pattern into the session pattern.

He of course reacted to the annoyance on your part. The tests from this standpoint were highly explosive, for he did not understand the situation, and found himself in a position highly ambiguous. You were encouraging him to even further spontaneity on the one hand, to intuitional freedom, and yet to his point of view requiring him to exert all kinds of discipline, which he felt was your role—to follow the intuitions so far, know when to stop at the proper target, and it was here that he first deeply felt you as a taskmaster.

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.

For a while then you were willing, comparatively speaking, to let Ruburt express the spontaneous, strongly spontaneous, elements of both of your personalities; with the joys and perils involved, and denying him the responsibility of learning how to temper and use spontaneity. He was willing to let you express the reasoning, deliberate qualities of both of your personalities—the deliberating elements, and to that extent not permitting you to fully express your own spontaneity. You would not learn to use and enjoy it while he did it for you.

One more sentence: this arrangement automatically sets up artificial barriers between spontaneity and discipline, and colorations that were sexual in nature, leading to deductions such as: spontaneity was dangerous, obviously, since it needed such controls.

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.