“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 have, Joseph, your own invisible beliefs. In a way Ruburt was doing precisely what you would do on one level—not leaving the house, avoiding tours, simply working, cutting out all distractions, and again you approved—not of methods, but of everything else.

The idea of cutting down stimuli and concentrating on work was quite agreeable to both of you for some time, far beyond the time you think it was. (Pause.) You then had to do many of the chores, and go out into the world, in you must admit a small fashion, but Ruburt was afraid that otherwise you would retreat.

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.

Now all of this tonight is in response to one question, and would apply whether or not psychic work was involved. It is only lately that each of you have really become worried enough to want a real change.