“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

He did of course care deeply, (and had) his interpretation of your feelings: he believed that the symptoms served you both, that you would on the one hand object, give lip service against his methods, but that underneath they provided you service.

We are working with his beliefs. He felt that you would find tours, etc., highly disruptive. There would be endless decisions to be made. The symptoms cut the need for decisions in that area.

As mentioned today, he felt they served you, helped you save face in your family, and in society at large. You were not to be given the second place. Ruburt obviously needed you. Some of this did have to do with old ideas that you were angry at him for any success if you had not achieved your own—and more, that the success might take you on tours and further away from your own work, which would make you angrier at him.

At the same time you encouraged him to success, but he felt only to a certain point, for the fruits of the success you might find disruptive. In the family to which he has always been sensitive he believed his success put you down, particularly with your mother and Loren. (My younger brother.)

His symptoms were meant, in a way, now, in regard to you, to make you feel better, for by contrast you became the success and he the failure. That failure was also meant to take your mind away from what he believed you believed was your own failure as an artist.

With others and strangers coming here, the symptoms put you, he believed, in a position of prominence, obviously the head of the family, having to take care of the frail woman—to compensate for the fact that he was financially making more. In this regard the illness was almost a gesture of defiance against any who would put you down.

At the same time he began to see what the symptoms turned you off to some degree, and this made him angry. Some late instances I have mentioned, having to do with his beliefs and interpretations now, of your actions in dance establishments.

He would purposely choose occasions in which dancing, to begin with, was at least not the thing—when no one else was dancing, when an ordinary person might have inhibitions against it. The very challenge was made because it, the challenge, aroused him to action in a situation in which he felt your natural inhibitions would meet up against his denied spontaneity.

When you refused to dance, he interpreted this to mean that he was right: he could be spontaneous only as long as it was socially approved, did not hassle you, and when he did not stand out from the crowd.

There is more there, but it is a cameo situation involving many important ingredients, where he feels that letting go means he is too flamboyant for you. It is important because it involves both private and public circumstances, his attitude toward himself, you, and other people, spontaneity, and restraint.

He wanted to dance precisely because no one else was. Because you would stand out, because it was not the thing to do, and he felt and believed that those were precisely the reasons why you did not want him to do so.

The dancing situation is also important because bodily motion is involved. He always believed, now, that when you spoke to him in the past about walking faster than you, or not waiting for you to open doors, that you were saying to him “You are going too fast for me, and putting me in a poor social light.”

He believed that you wanted sex, but that you were afraid of it, as he was, because of the possibility of pregnancy. Here the symptoms served also, and cut down the possibility of sexual activity.

He was afraid during the tour that you would feel put in second place, rather than as an artist being the star of your own show.

For some time he did not feel that you wanted him to get better, but only to keep the symptoms within bounds. Again, this is in reference to you, and not the whole picture. On one level he felt you were quite willing to have him do this, again, as long as he did not go too far.

Then he felt that you were accusing him of being stupid, but without trying to come up with any solutions of your own. Then he felt completely alone, with a problem he feared he could not solve. He looked to your reaction after any spontaneous behavior, and he believed, now, that your reaction was negative.

Very simply, the dancing episodes serve as an example. It seemed to him that if he spontaneously felt happy about a book that you would remind him of less favorable aspects. On the other hand he was convinced of your deep loyalty and love, and knew that you did want him to succeed and use his abilities.

He felt that you disapproved of class, of the spontaneity, and did not ever attend, while you were pleased with the money, and that if you attended you would be in second place. That is why when the two of you met as a unit, so to speak, with the Rochester group (last week) that he allowed himself greater freedom, and in that context he believed you approved. (The Seth III episode, etc.)

Again, on a very simple level, he believes that if he were better he would always be wanting to dance in improper conditions as far as you were concerned.

Now. As partners, to some extent consciously you agreed to varying attitudes at different times to the conditions, though the main elements of course are Ruburt’s. You feel the necessity for some restraint in social encounters, and with the world at large. Ruburt is providing them, and also for his own reasons. He is showing the spontaneity in his work that you have denied yourself in many respects in yours. He is dealing with the world of markets that you have been unwilling to deal with. That is why you are so sensitive in that area.

Your basic trust and loyalty to each other, for example. Many spend a lifetime searching for that recognition with another human being, or achieve it but briefly. You are blind to this, yet others are quite aware that you have it. Besides, you each have deep interests and drives that have always united you; and you, Joseph, in this life served as an impetus to organize Ruburt’s abilities. He knew this. So did you. There are several time’s simultaneous existences, and you are both interacting in several. This deep inner knowledge provides each of you, whether or not you realize it, with strong ties of creaturehood, and deep loyalties to “both worlds.”

Give us time.... You have agreed that restraints should be used. Ruburt chose the method. The methods came from his own experience in this life. The things you both strongly agreed upon were allowed freedom within those limitations. Until recently you spoke to him against travel because you lost work time. He believed that you thought it a waste of time, so he did not believe his lack of physical mobility that way would hamper you.

He feared that left alone he would want to travel at the drop of a hat. Your deepest drives involve inner work. He thought he chose methods then that would annoy each of you the least.

You each have strong drives toward secrecy. Your idea was to isolate yourself on a mountaintop, where the world could not get at you. His idea was an arrangement where he could not go out into the world.

Ruburt took it for granted that the body could take so much, and that he could reverse the conditions. Then he became afraid that he could not reverse them, and only then did the two of you really become worried.

Only the physical effects frightened either of you for some time. Ruburt was afraid also you would retreat as he felt your father had. Therefore he put you in a position where retreat was impossible. To some extent you were afraid of the same thing.