“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane had obtained excellent material on her own today, working with beliefs about her writing, symptoms, and movement about the house. The idea was that physical restraints would keep her at her desk and remove temptations to do other things. We were anxious to hear what Seth would have to say about this material.

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.

Ruburt’s set of beliefs for some time were so invisible, and he identified with them so completely, that it was extremely difficult for him to examine them in the light of the present and his now situation.

The paper written today should be discussed by both of you so that those ideas are brought completely into the open where he can consciously and intellectually examine them. Your emotions follow your beliefs. For many reasons then he was convinced that his course was correct. His methods began to alarm him, but even when they did, and he realized that he was making a bargain of a sort, he still believed in the premise that made a bargain necessary.

Because many of his ideas and beliefs were also bound up with you, your work, your ideas and his interpretations of them, then your relationship became entwined. Initially the beliefs were accepted because he had been taught to believe to fear his energy. On the other hand it was his pride. Now in another kind of life-style, with another kind of personality, the same belief might have been dispensed with easily. If energy flows in conventional accepted patterns it is not feared.

(Intently, as above:) His nature then on other levels would follow the same pattern. He felt that this same quality, physically translated, led to a physical spontaneity that would make the inner spontaneity more difficult to achieve. Spontaneity and energy used in his work was one thing, but allowed physical translation, he felt, could mean bizarre, unreasonable physical complications.

If he were as spontaneous physically as he was mentally, then his living situation could become unstable. In your early relationship this could mean anything from sudden trips across country, an overactive social life, or even sexual attraction to men outside of marriage.

He was then just over 30, and felt that his abilities had not begun to show fruition. The beliefs gathered momentum then, coming from structures from childhood that he felt he could use, and from you ideas, which then, were very much like his.

There are other issues of which he has been lately somewhat aware, connected here for example. In the beginning the symptoms made certain that he would not have to get a job. That fear no longer operates. The belief as he wrote it alone was simply that to do his creative work he had to curtail other activities. In the beginning as an apprentice writer this was to allow him to develop.

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.

His writing seemed dependent upon the curtailment of activities of other kinds. Give us a moment.... When the system was set up, for many reasons having to do with relative youth and lack of experience, he did not have any confidence in his conscious ability to say no, to hold to a “line of attack.” He was afraid he would be swept willy-nilly. He was also afraid, particularly when he tried teaching, that he might be led to give up and settle for another occupation that would bring automatic respectability, money, and some prestige.

Give me a moment. I want to organize this so it makes sense to you... For other reasons, the fear of pregnancy for example, physical spontaneity was also suspect, and here again you were involved. Not that you consciously approved the methods used, but he had his situation and yours always in mind, and was convinced he was acting for both of your interest.

Now these are his interpretations, but whenever you rejected his spontaneous advances, for whatever reasons you may have had, this helped reinforce that idea. There was, my dear friend, little danger of Ruburt becoming pregnant, when spontaneous passionate moments on both of your parts were cut out.

You made love when it was safe to do so. Now this involved tricks on both of your parts, to which you both agreed. The conscious material was there. You simply ignored it. You made sure you had a good reason not to make love when Ruburt spontaneously wanted to, and the same applied to him.

With the dream book he tried to do something he did not consider artistic, and was unable to do it. He believed in the book’s ideas, but the artistic framework for him was not right. When it was rejected my book was developing. Finances were mixed up with freedom to write, then.

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.

Buying a house was in direct opposition to several other beliefs. The money from books gave him freedom to write more books, so to buy was a threat. At the same time he wanted to move, though he has been more satisfied than you.

The beliefs had built up then to such an extent that highly ritualized behavior was involved. He had to be at his desk at certain times immediately. Now that has vanished. He worked that through out of sheer desperation.

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.

Until that distinction was seen then he felt his writing dependent upon the symptoms. They were retained in order to maintain concentration, period. When a book was being produced, and afterward.

Now when Ruburt imaginatively saw the trailer, and so forth (on our Sunday drive last weekend) and experienced that mobility in imagination, your reaction was the same as the one used for my analogy above. In his way he was using an excellent procedure, and what you thought of as reminding him of the facts was instead inhibiting freedom.

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.

Gradually his belief system led to more restrictive behavior, even to some extent impeding inner flow. The psychic was suspect in the beginning, as it seemed to conflict with his writing ideas. This was largely cleared through my books and Seven.

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.

The sex was denied on a physical level to a large extent, as he read so-called psychic books. Much of this is based on the youthful feeling he had to direct his energy toward his work. He found his physical age frightening for a while, and was therefore not able to use the experience gained with age. To give up the youthful ideas was to admit that he was no longer the young writer.

To let these ideas go was to let his youth go, and to admit that many of those ideas, believed in so strongly and so stubbornly, were not working any longer. Even your remarks about a black-haired wife meant the image of a woman in her 20’s—the-younger-than-you obviously youthful, spontaneous and cute wife; not a 44-year-old woman with experience behind her, some sense, and who could stand on her own feet, but a much younger version, youthful enough to get into trouble, and to be humorously watched in that regard.

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.

In the light of that picture improvement was not reasonable, not to be expected. What was projected finally however was your complete statement that you no longer agreed with the methods, that you would no longer go along with them, and this was to the good.

(“I believed it was my duty to use my creative abilities each day, to concentrate fully there and to exclude everything else I could.”)