“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The basic discontent colored your other attitudes, both toward your environment, your own work, and other people. (Very good.)

Your discussion this evening was beneficial and showed a point in progress on both of your parts. Earlier Ruburt would have become alarmed and frightened, felt you were being negative, and discouraged at any verbal and emotional encounter with the feelings that you expressed, precisely because they brought into the open feelings of his. This time however he recognized that earlier he would have brooded and gone to bed, leaving you to brood alone at his ways.

The change of environment has been and is good for both of you in ways you may not presently comprehend. A few you glimpse. It is obviously good for you to look at the world simply from a different viewpoint. It is particularly good that you see the situation here in Florida, on the spot, so that you feel free in making choices—a real Florida, not a fantasized one.

A point now that I want you to heed in advance: In the past, because of joint negative attitudes, I have given the reasons for some of these. Improvements in Ruburt’s condition were ignored (underlined) largely by both of you, and instead concentration was upon the symptoms that still remained.

After the first bad bouts for example, when he improved enough to go up and down stairs without even limping, when he was agile enough at least to climb some rocks at the Glen (Enfield, near Ithaca, NY), to swim after being largely incapacitated, you both acted as if the improvements meant nothing, discounted them largely, and concentrated upon those symptoms that did indeed still remain.

I am not saying that he was completely better then, but the improvements far outweighed the symptoms at that time. Do not let that happen again. That was the result of discounting improvements as they did show themselves, and this applies to both of you.

You chose to do what you did, individually and jointly. In narrow terms you can say that you both made a mistake. In larger terms no error was made. You simply happen to be dealing with the area of activity in which terms like “mistake” appears valid. Do you follow me?

Now. I will tell you something else. You felt that you owed it to your mother to try a secure type of financial arrangement, as far as you were personally able to do so. You realized that a full-time job was out of the question. Remember at least that you did not fall into that trap, and that you both had enough sense to avoid it.

Ruburt also of course knew this, as he knew about your curly-headed friend the other night (at the Hurricane bar, amused), and he reacted vehemently, particularly against your parents. To help support your mother, particularly in the beginning under the situation as he sensed it, and with all of his other anti-mother sentiments, was the greatest of outrages. This is another reason for his actions on the Sunday visits. Hopefully, this will help you both understand.

Now we will shortly close. I want to remind you however that I went to considerable pains to give you some of the important reasons why you both had a tendency, a strong one, toward repression. Why Ruburt began by repressing unpleasant ideas, and why you initially began by repressing hopeful ones.

Part of the difficulty is that it has become a symbol of Ruburt’s disabilities at this point. At home the stairs are the symbols. After working one day, Ruburt expects instant results. Now there have been results. As you begin to make your own work plans, and work, this will also generate results. Remember the encounter (of February 19)—it was with a part of both of your personalities, not only Ruburt’s.