“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Earlier this evening you were discussing your beliefs, and beliefs is the name of the game. The exercises will serve you as well as Ruburt. In this situation two are involved, and “therapy” must involve each of you. Your own creativity will be vastly improved, and the exercises dealing with feelings will be invaluable to both of you.

You live in private yet joint realities. Ruburt has chosen his, and you have chosen that his reality be involved with yours. Ruburt is not simply stuck with a bunch of symptoms, and you are not stuck just with a wife who has problems.

Now give us a moment. (Pause.) You are financially secure. Ruburt’s classes will not suffer despite appearances (the energy crisis). Much of what I said last evening applied to you, Joseph. Ruburt, so sensitive to your moods, and being self-conditioned to some extent himself negatively, reacted. He wanted to help you, and felt powerless to a large extent.

Ruburt was already leery of putting his physical condition to the test of the trip, and so easily acquiesced, worried also that perhaps he would lose out on Aspects, that was already contracted for.

At the same time you think, for several reasons, that at your age you should have a house, privacy to work, a way even of proving to your brothers that you have as much as they. Ruburt instead sees a trailer by the ocean, with each of you writing and painting—his vision, because that establishment requires no housekeeping and a small cash outlay.

(9:55.) Give us a moment.... You both are so afraid of being tied down however that even in the apartment you did not allow yourselves really to feel at home—to buy your furniture, cheap or expensive. You love and hate family, precisely as Ruburt does. He because he never really had one, and you because you did.

A house in town reminds you each of family living, and you of your neighborhood. At the same time for all your protest, the (to me) apartment noises are comforting. You interpret them as conflicts. They remind you of the noises in your family home, conflicting and yet comforting. You rail at them, railing at your parents’ arguments. To Ruburt the sounds are reassuring. He is not alone with his mother any more.

Each of you sees buying a house now as a threat, though you are at times tempted. You have always seen family life yourself as a threat to artistic production, and the first thing you would do if you had a house would be to build a studio outside of it. You did not want children. Whatever methods Ruburt chose to insure that you were childless you proclaimed with joy, glad that you were not the woman.

Some of the symptoms then were indeed to insure your joint work integrity. You identified as a child whose presence betrayed its father, your father being forced to support you, particularly in the Depression. Ruburt as you know had his own reasons. Ruburt’s relative immobility kept him childless. You were turned off physically often, or he was not able to perform when you were not turned off.

Now: the other side of the picture. Ruburt sought you out for much the same reasons, with reincarnational background to be given. But Ruburt was the female: you would not bear any child, so the effort had to be strong on his part. Thoughts of buying a house throw both of you into a quandary because they directly come in conflict with your private ideas about your work and purposes, and your places in the world.

Give us a moment.... Your ideas of rustic simplicity do not match your feelings about dedication to work. Ruburt’s ideas of owning a house do not match his ideas of dedication to work. That is why his interpretation is a trailer. Both ideas are idealized, sentimentalized and distorted in your minds, and either could be incorporated in your ideas of work if you were aware of the conflicts.

You have never allowed yourselves creative decorating freedom here, for example, and thus denied yourselves considerable satisfaction. Now the walking is directly involved with all of this. With the ideas of either buying a house or going to Florida, and what these issues involve in line with your current beliefs as given. Your mother’s death makes Ruburt want to go further inward for more answers. At the same time he is trying to make outer decisions.