“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I want to say something about beliefs that became obvious to him today concerning time and “work.” The ideas of work have been largely covered. His beliefs about time are important in relationship to his work ideas. As he noted, the belief was that he must be the young American poet, or the young American writer. Now we are dealing with an old belief system once shared to a large extent by you both.

In that system he saw you nearly ten years older than he, and in those terms unsatisfied; so he must work all the harder against time, and cut out everything else. In that system, as he developed it, there was no time for leisurely meals, showers, shopping trips or mundane enjoyments—only the work was important. Only it would survive. The day in which it was produced would vanish and be nothing—only the work would survive as a monument. The trivialities and moods, the feelings of morning and twilight would be extinguished—so he thought as you told him, and so against many of his natural instincts he tried to obey.

So the day became nothing more than a framework in which he must work, and in which all relationships had little value except as they were interpreted through work. He became pursued by time, so that in his world there literally was no time for anything else.

At the same “time” his body kept trying to assert its privileges and natural life, but he saw it as a tool to work. He understands now a good deal of this, but I want to put it in form for him. Even his writing time therefore became frenzied. He did not live in the moment, or know his body’s present reality. Sensations and impulse were deadened, unless they could be translated into “work.”

Now this did finally become so reflected that feeling shunted aside threatened his work, and he finally recognized this. He was afraid of out-of-bodies precisely because he did not have a good enough footing in the present. He did not have the needed support.

The body’s weight was kept down for the same reasons, because he felt according to those old beliefs, that the body’s sustenance and substance in physical reality was not important in regard to his work. These ideas are also vanishing now. The body with weight and substance might be unmanageable, filled with too much energy, and therefore want the physical activity he thought he must deny it for his work. It is not a matter of what he ate, but chemically what he did with the nourishment.

Any panic he now recognizes having to do with time represents left-over old obsessions about the necessity to work with a time limit. Even in those limited terms you see he realized that his achievements and production are in his terms now sufficient; but he must move out of those limiting ideas, and he is.

Now: all of Ruburt’s presently-past beliefs added up to his physical condition—his beliefs in the nature of time, work, the body, his particular nature—they all tied in together perfectly.

Each person’s personal reality has the same kind of unity. There is nothing that does not fit into the picture. There were achievements and joys along the way, and these should not be forgotten or minimized. They were all the result of beliefs also. Ruburt believed that they were only achieved by neglecting the body. He realizes now that the body’s reality is the framework through which all must come in this life, and that limiting its vitality will eventually end up limiting all experience and all “work.”