“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At the same time he gave less and less nourishment to the body, denied it exercise until it began to wither from disuse. He goes inward then with great applied focus, but held the body in such tight reins that he denied it both energy and attention.

You had a history of bodily achievement in terms of sports, that led you to take an additional joy in the body that tempered the basic concepts you held. Ruburt did not.

The tendencies to so withdraw and deny the body were early obvious, but unrecognized. In college only the body’s miraculous youth protected it when Ruburt did not eat properly, subsisted mainly on coffee and cigarettes, and went without proper sleep for months at a time.

He often hid from fellow students out of shyness and fear of confronting them. He would hide in his poetry. The tendency then was there. He had no great faith in the body because he saw how his mother’s behaved, without any knowledge of the reasons. The body was not strong, therefore. He did not trust it. He trusted his mind, so the idea of retreating from the body into the mind was quite logical to him when this began. (The sessions or the symptoms?)

For reasons given much earlier, you both worried about the body mechanism in terms of childbirth, and it suited both of your purposes to minimize the possibilities in that direction, and to save yourselves from the monthly fear that a birth might have resulted.

Ruburt put his body on a strict survival level, giving it the barest of attention. He is in the habit of ignoring its feelings, attitudes or desires, so that he is quite numb to some of them.

Numb to the body’s desires for exercise, motion, air. Do you follow me?

Now the body quickly made its protests known, and Ruburt squelched them whenever possible. The body was not important except as it supported his ideas. His will would drive it.

A good number of his depressions were body depressions. The body was de-pressed, pressed down, and this of course affected the psychic state. He hides his body in his dress. His face is in good condition because he considers that the mirror of his soul, and allows it therefore free-enough expression. He trusts his head.

The body’s exuberance has been hidden and denied. It is given some exercise, when you go dancing; sudden exercise after inactivity. You have no daily structure for physical exertion or daily activity of any kind. The body’s exuberance must be gently teased out, now, because it has been forcibly restrained.

The idea that being is its own justification is important here: The rights and privileges of the body cannot be long ignored, though Ruburt’s body has withstood very much. You should be thankful under the circumstances that the condition was not worse, for the body’s own resiliency fought back, and provided some balance out of its own sanity.

The body often would not allow sleep, since the muscles simply needed to be used. They would jump on their own simply for the exercise, regardless of suggestions that sleep come. You both minimized the importance of physical life to a large degree. Your nature and the circumstances prevented you from falling into a like but similar sort of situation.

When Ruburt felt, as I have told you, that you no longer loved him, then he had less use of the body. He feels his body’s condition should tell you how devoted he has been to his work, instead of getting at it for not walking right or eating enough. He feels you should consider his condition as one of the means adopted in a goal in which you both believe. He was then afraid of giving up the condition for fear of using physical energy at the expense of mental energy, and hence at the expense of his work.

The condition with the teeth simply resulted from keeping a tight upper lip, clamping down the jaw. He made his bed, he would lie in it. To relax meant to let down the guard, and distractions in. The physical strains altered the appearance of the teeth, then. Physically there were infections, enough to maintain the condition and no more. The condition had certain invisible boundaries that were carefully maintained. Only when the body objected and went over those boundaries did he become frightened, for he saw then that he lacked the control over the body he thought he held. He could not silence all of its objections.

The body knows its splendor.