“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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?

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.

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.

Now. The division was actually an exaggerated projection of the predominating tendencies of your present personalities.

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.

Ruburt is apt to be more adjusting in that area, but here also you see, you have set certain unconscious points, boundaries on either side between what you consider too close contact, and too little. The tendencies operate in all areas, and they provide very constructive guidelines, and are beneficial when they are not carried to extremes, and when the focus is on maintaining the balance between. Because of your fears, both of you had your eyes out instead for the danger points.

In your contact physically with others these tendencies also apply. Ruburt will allow himself to be taken advantage of, for example, more easily than you in personal contacts. This outrages you because your symbolic danger point is brought into focus. It bothers him, but less.

Now give us a moment. Some of this of course can be and has been turned to your advantage. Your tendency toward feeling safe in noncontact situations means that you do not want models in your studio, yet you are highly intrigued by personality. This has led you to develop psychic abilities for creative purposes—that you would not have needed nor sought otherwise.

This noncontact tendency has also had something to do with the fact that you have not attempted to sell your paintings more actively, and all of this fits in with the material I gave you lately along these lines—the male and female connotations.

For this reason you also feel that they are not challenging to produce, as compared with your other paintings. Ordinarily you seldom paint women, feeling that in such paintings emotions would be too blatantly displayed. You may have to watch a tendency to masculinize your women if you seriously begin to do such work, for you may feel, again, that harsher lines are necessary to hold the emotional element in check.

There is no particular reason why you should do women unless you want to. I am not telling you in other words to do so. I simply wanted this evening to round out the discussion, showing how these tendencies operate in various areas of your lives.

We will resume dictation Monday, and after the last break present your questions then. I did not want to leave you with the impression that these basic tendencies of yours and Ruburt’s were negative, for they have and will serve good purposes. You will be much better able to deal with them and use them constructively now however, for the unconscious material has been brought to the surface where it can be assimilated and understood.