“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt is motivated quite simply and powerfully by his love for you and his work. Since he has known you these have been the two main directions out of which his being flows. Take into consideration the information given in our last session.

Now. When Ruburt had outside jobs he used encounters with others to take up the slack that existed between his emotional nature and your own. When he worked at home the differences in your temperaments became more noticeable. He was also extremely concerned that he learn to discipline himself—now that he had an entire day, and to prove to you his appreciation of the fact that you were still working out.

When the two of you could work together, he thought, all that would change. You would have time to work and play. You would be more emotionally demonstrative, freed from your job. His work would bear more and more the burden of his needs, and take up the emotional slack that was now apparent. It had to be everything, then. The more you two communicate in the way I mentioned, the less the pressure is in the work area.

For reasons already given, both of you later fell down. Sumari, and even Oversoul Seven, sprang into being as a result of the emotional rapport that existed between you just prior. When Seven was finished Dialogues began, and our book was in process. Ruburt was encouraged to express his feeling, and emotionally. This gave him some freedom.

Ruburt felt that you did not trust his relationship with Tam as far as the spontaneous handling of business was concerned, and that perhaps the dissatisfaction you expressed about Prentice had to do with a certain emotional sloppiness, where both he and Tam did not have the proper regard for detail, and lacked a kind of integrity that you valued.

Eleanor (Friede) represented a different kind of framework, in which business was business, while art was respected, and where after all matters of great money might be involved. Ruburt was rather proud of handling his own business affairs. Eleanor also represented on another level the establishment, the rich, literary, “in” crowd, and the great youthful specialized ideas of literary success.

Yet these people were coming to Ruburt because of his psychic work, and his psychically inspired writing. Eleanor, he discovered, was anything but his idealized concept of a literary editor. This was a shock. From the time Eleanor came she spoke with the words of Ruburt’s past, glowingly presenting the possibility of purely literary success, prestige, and cash.

He felt he did not know much, but that he knew more in ways important to him than these people did. They were coming to him when he so desperately had wanted to join them, thinking that his idealized, youthful hopes would there find fruition.

Yet for the entire time he began to wonder, regardless, about his position at Prentice. Was he being taken for a fool? Should he have changed to another publisher? But this meant in his case: should he try to exclusively be the literary person again? Yet he found that these people wanted his psychic work most of all. And that while they appreciated his other work, his main value in their eyes lay precisely in the field that he thought would mean nothing to them.

Dialogues represented a synthesis of literary and psychic endeavor. It also allowed Ruburt necessary emotional expression. Tim Foote represented literary recognition, yet he wrote to Ruburt to ask his psychic opinion on another psychic writer.

Seven represented the same kind of synthesis, and these were both Jane-type productions. After these Ruburt could not make up his mind. If you did not really approve of Prentice as a publisher, then he wondered seriously whether he should follow through with a new house, and with the hopes that Eleanor offered. You typed my book, and I appreciate the work and the reasons, but Ruburt felt it was also because you did not trust Prentice, and always that you thought another publisher would do a better job overall.

This immediately brought certain aspects to light that had been hidden to some extent while you were more physically separated. Some of this has to do, again, with the fact that you thought your concern automatically expressed your love. You were together more. When you saw him try to get up he knew you loved him, but the frown was what he saw. He was always trying to hide from you. Part of it was his projection because he felt you thought he was so stupid for having anything wrong at all, so the more he saw you frown the stupider he felt, and the more guilty. And the more he tried to hide his condition.

They were discarded as falsehoods. Regardless of your love, when you looked at him he often saw disapproval. By then this place (Apartment 4) represented isolation and retreat from your relationship’s fulfillment in line with what it had meant earlier, and his decision to come out with you again (into Apartment 5).

As he discovered today when he looked into a mirror, he was comparing his image now to what it had been several years ago literally—not only in terms of symptoms, you see. In an odd way he also thought, because of that, that you were constantly comparing him now with a 5-or-10-year earlier self.

Your own reactions since our last session are excellent. Ruburt felt, finally, that you saw him at his worst in the morning, and did not turn away from his as some crooked, broken, grotesque physical person. That was what he was afraid of in the light of your perfectionist tendencies. In a strange way he was relieved; seeing what he has been trying to hide, he feels, will give the both of you a basis from which you can operate, in which any improvements are appreciated.

Another string: Because he hid from you for the reasons given, then he would become angry at you, perversely enough, when you did not understand his great joyful triumph when he felt like dancing. You expected it, from the standpoint of someone physically in good condition.

Since he felt that you judged his physical behavior from that “superior” position, then he felt that no improvement except complete recovery would get your approval. Anything else would always fall short.

You said “I think you can perform 50% better than you are doing, if you realize it.” That kind of suggestion is good. It arouses and stimulates activity without causing him to compare his experience with what is to him an ideal. Take your break.

After Eleanor’s refusal Ruburt was left with Rich Bed. Now this is his projection, and one he only realized at break: he felt that any incomplete manuscripts were indications of a waste of time, and that you thought he should publish everything he wrote, and that an unpublished manuscript was a blot of sorts. You often mentioned Dreams for example, when he was only too willing to forget it. So he felt guilty about Rich Bed even though it wasn’t finished.

All of the decisions he made, finally, were good ones from all viewpoints. In the meantime however, because of these issues all meeting, and his reactions as given, his condition worsened. The momentary feeling of powerlessness in the business area added to the physical sense of powerlessness. He was simply afraid that he could not improve.

Remembering your past ideas toward Prentice, he wondered, regardless of what you said, if you thought he should stay with them. He was very afraid of losing a contract with Prentice for Aspects, and a Bantam contract, while waiting around for another arrangement. At the same time he was afraid of making demands at Prentice for fear he would discover that they didn’t care if he stayed or not. Feeling that way he still went ahead on his own, and felt happily vindicated. The whole affair, with his reactions now, still had him at the point where he did not think he could physically recover, and he was caught in a panic that he tried to hide from you.

Before we finish tonight I want to speak about the responsibility for his consciousness, and at least mention the morning dilemma. Take a brief break.

Ruburt took the responsibility for his consciousness in other areas far more than most people do. He had no strong background structure in which to build up a confidence in the body mechanisms. The youthful body was able to maintain an equilibrium.

Ruburt felt his consciousness more powerfully in almost any other area. It has been difficult for him to accept the fact that the mind literally controls the body. He now sees that he must exert his abilities in that direction, and your own understanding of the issue in that area will be of help to him.

It was not that he didn’t accept the responsibility so much as that, in that weakest area, he did not realize the strength of his own conscious thoughts to alter the body mechanism. You can help him most by lovingly reminding him of that.

The morning episodes are directly related to the fact lately that he grew to doubt his ability to recover, and face each morning the prospect of a day in which he tried to hide those feelings from himself and from you. The hallway between the bedroom and the bath became, symbolically, the hallway to physical activity through which he was afraid he could not pass, and through whose portals he must go alone, since he did not want to burden you with his despondency over it.