“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.

Ruburt in his own way recognizes the charge behind what you say. Sound to him does not have the same meaning, though he may dislike the noise. He interprets your remarks therefore as aimed against distractions in general, recognizing your symbolism, and this makes him uneasy because in his own life he has taken the steps he has to cut down distractions.

He becomes more afraid of them as you speak in such a way, and through your attitude, as he interprets it, the distractions seem more threatening.

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.

Now: your attitude and his interpretation of it, to him, clearly jibed. Such courses would also represent distractions to you. He thought you hated distractions, and for a period of time he felt that you thought him one.

Give us time.... He had schooled himself to believe that distractions of any kind had to be eliminated. This means that in writing a book he withdrew, and more and more, physically speaking. It was his idea of training. The issues were also operating between you, as his paper on belief indicates.

The reason that he could not get rid of the symptoms was simply that he believed them necessary requirements to his work. The symptoms and curtailment of activities were invisibly combined, so that he did not realize you could consciously set up a system in which you could work freely without distractions, and be perfectly free to do whatever else you wanted otherwise.

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.

Letters and calls were interpreted as distractions mainly—as another pull upon his energies. He recognized the psychic source of his writing, which cleared the psychic area in that respect, finally. But he was afraid that the spontaneity denied in physical life would run rampant now in inner psychic experience.

Working nights or early mornings is a kind of solution, and a method of illumination in which he is forced to make conscious decisions. It is a way of consciously deciding to operate, to cut out distractions. It shows him there are alternatives, and will automatically make him think of others.

(Jane’s handwritten notes: “Now the distractions are the symptoms—I have to get rid of them.