“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt feels that he has a dragon by the tail. He is damned if he will let go and yet he is afraid to pull harder. You can specifically say that this has to do with what you call your psychic work, but even before “it” began he was aware of that energy of his, concerned about using it, focusing it, delighted with it, and afraid of it at the same time.

(10:22.) Greater recognition might help at a certain level, but this is not the answer. The fact that psychic books, so-called, do not give him what he thinks of as conventional literary praise is annoying but not basically pertinent.

He has been using the symptoms indeed as brakes. These brakes have been applied in what you think of as the psychic arena because that is the chosen situation. It is not physical mobility that worries him, but inner mobility. He is afraid to go ahead, feeling it not safe, yet he is damned if he will retreat, and for that matter he realizes that there is no retreat from your own knowledge and experience.

It is no use saying you wish no psychic development had occurred. It is like saying you wish a tree was a violet, or vice-versa. The experience is his nature. This nature also required precise and yet flexible and free manipulation. This is acquired naturally through experience, through the experience of being himself. When he began to cut off his natural spontaneous expression in dream reality, out-of-body travel, etc., he denied himself the acquisition of that facility to some degree.

Then he applied the brakes physically. The free flow of his experience goes rather easily, and incidentally, safely and exuberantly from what you think of as objective and subjective experience, and his creative gifts then make subjective knowledge objective in terms of art.

You however also expected Ruburt to put on brakes, and for some time acquiesced, as he did. You wanted what you thought of as adequate discipline maintained, and in other areas as well. The symptoms served secondary purposes afterward, and in all honesty for both of you.

It is true that Ruburt’s ideas predominate, that his reality is his, but yours is a part of it, as his is a part of yours. He felt therefore that you did approve of the overall idea, if not particularly the methods. And in the beginning you approved those in your own way.

There is no doubt, regardless of what you think you think, that you also acquiesced, though thinking that Ruburt went too far. It is only when he goes too far that either of you get upset.

(11:10.) A less determined personality would have drawn back, shriveled, and denied its own abilities. Ruburt did not do that, and you would not have acquiesced to that, so your joint and private reality does not include it.

I want him to come over here (to the living room), make his coffee or whatever, be alone with himself and follow his impulses—to write or whatever, and to recall his dream experiences. You must let him know that you do trust him and his spontaneity, because before, no matter what you said, he knew that to some degree you wanted brakes applied.

Let him know also you are there. In a strange manner, not to be given this evening, your own painting mobility is involved. I am not saying that his reality is not his own, that he does not have the joy and responsibility for it, but that you also share a joint reality.