“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. I would like to give you some more personal material. Incidentally, Ruburt read the chapter on which we are working, and was newly astonished. (Chapter 15 of Seth’s own book, Seth Speaks.)

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.

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?

With Ruburt of course it leads to work blockages, particularly along poetry lines where the emotions appear very clearly. Ruburt saw today that the intellectual portions of the self, and even the literal-mindedness, served an excellent purpose in allowing him to objectify highly intuitive material, and to give it actuality in the world that you know. He did not understand this earlier.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Within that area you will both find greater freedom, warmth and creativity. Your work will show great advantage, and the energy that has been bottled up can be released. Understanding the issues will automatically help you form this center. It should be flexible enough now for both of you, and not the formation of one rigid point. (Laugh.)

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.

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.

You feel that abstracts in this respect are neutral, and therefore you feel safe in marketing and selling them. You do not feel that they are as much a part of your self as your other work. You do not feel that they tell as much about you, or that they contain self-revelations.

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.

For our next few sessions I will work on our book, do a few chapters, and then if you prefer take some time out for reincarnational material, so that it does not go by the board.