“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.

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.

Give us a moment.... He had, as you mentioned, the inner knowledge of his own abilities that had, he felt, to be used. After his first marriage he determined, with the help of your love, to find a suitable framework. His natural abilities are unconventionally tuned, highly spontaneous, working through intuitive loops; in a certain way, now, from a normally conscious viewpoint, unpredictable.

(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.

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.

These two events made him pull in his horns; or rather, his interpretation of them in the light of your relationship. He always felt now, and work this out yourselves, that you focused upon the most negative aspects of his condition, and ignored any improvement as minute. But more, that you almost disapproved of them, that you expected him to be in poor shape. So he would hide any he felt from you often for fear you would crush them, or make him lose whatever small confidence in himself physically he’d gained.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seeing you work, as these last few days, instantly made him see other alternatives in which the same ends are met, but without cutting down on physical flexibility. The most seemingly impractical ideas, imaginatively considered, may be precisely the most practical in greater terms. Your expectations must be changed, and despite what so-called practical experience shows you. That is why a puny weakling who cannot lift a sack of groceries may suddenly find himself holding up a car so a child can escape.