“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

This small episode this evening is an excellent example of your joint behavior and beliefs. Noise to you personally is a symbol for all of life’s distractions. You are then particularly sensitive in that area. Any discussion between you is at two levels, then, where sound of an unpleasant nature is involved.

Creative people, if they succeed at all, often find themselves in a position where they feel that the precious inward isolation is threatened. Demands are then made by the outside world that were not made earlier. The inward work ends up causing them to relate to a physical world when they believed that their duty was to shut themselves off from that world.

When he found himself becoming at all known after the tour, the symptoms, after having lifted to a large degree, returned with a vengeance, because then he was suddenly, to his way of thinking, besieged by distractions of a different kind. Then he was also afraid that this spontaneity and unconventionally attuned energy could be misdirected, again physically away from work. He could become for example a television personality.

(My note added later: “I remember all of this well. How Jane got much worse as soon as we got back home from tour. RB, December 10, 1980.)”

Since all of this made such sense to him, he did not change it. Nor could he see beyond it. Until yesterday he could not see himself apart from the system of beliefs.

In many areas then both of you controlled your spontaneity. For Ruburt this had greater dangers than it did for you because he is geared toward spontaneous action. Other issues would have subsidiary effects, all within the framework. For him the writing abilities had to be allowed freedom. The psychic initiation actually united them. The early novels, published, would have led to another kind of personal problem, since all involved were living. He would still have had to face the world, so to speak. To be free to write freely, he had also to make a certain financial success, or he would need a job.

A bicycle has all kinds of connotations for him. It seems unreasonable, watching him, to think that he could even begin to ride one. Watching him you would not think he could get to a dance floor, much less move. He mentioned adjusting the seat. You have been afraid to fix it, thinking he might hurt himself. That is another point however that is important.

You are to some degree, both of you, using the symptoms as excuses. Ruburt is afraid that if he can operate in a trailer, and he can, that you will find yourselves losing work time, running all over the country, and you are afraid of the same thing. Any project the two of you are attracted to but think will be distracting, you blame on the symptoms. Since this is never challenged you never know whether or not Ruburt can perform.

Symbolic interpretations immediately became obvious, and yet brought out into the open, as in tonight’s episode. I do not want to duplicate material, but Ruburt’s seeing you working without symptoms was of great benefit. Your reaction then to the noise was upsetting, which is quite all right, because now your reactions there can be consciously assimilated. Your reaction is to yell about the condition, yet you do not move. His has been to say little and to withdraw. Though your particular interpretations of distractions may vary, to him the noise itself, for example, is not so charged. But quite rightly he recognizes the noise as your symbol for distraction.

When you do so the problem is all, and it blots out everything else. The more you concentrate on it as the problem in order to get rid of it, the more you blot out other aspects of experience that could help you solve it.

Practically, in the light of the man’s experience, such an activity would seem impossible. You have been looking, both of you, to see how bad Ruburt was, how much worse he would get, until each of you projected the situation into the future until he was nearly bedridden—all in a misguided attempt to get yourselves out of the situation.