“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A note: Late this morning Jane and I drove up to the Hoffman Street post office and mailed the corrected script of Personal Reality to Prentice-Hall. Now we wait for page proofs, supposedly due in a month or so, correct those, and our part of the long job will be done. I told Jane I thought the book would be very successful.

(This is the first session since the deleted one of January 7, which was held just before the script for Personal Reality came back to us. Since then Jane has become noticeably worse in her symptoms. Today she told me that she had become very frightened. I had noticed the changes, of course, and became very despairing. Today I described the question in my mind as I fell asleep last night: With such a situation developing, why hadn’t she at least asked—let alone demanded—sessions, in order to find out what was going on? Of course I often have such thoughts, and have often been completely baffled by her behavior in this regard; I said I thought the fact that we were busy—even more so than usual—should have nothing to do with holding off on such a need. I also said I must have responsibility for her symptoms in ways I still don’t understand.)

Viewing you as he viewed himself, using the same logic, he was afraid however that basically you felt our work a detriment to your own, and that its success, while pleasing you on the one hand, might prevent you from success as an artist because you would not have the time, and that you would basically resent it. You always encouraged him in our work, and he knew this. Still, your part in it conflicted with his ideas of you and what you wanted.

He wanted you to have what you wanted to have. He considered your painting—and much that he has done has been on your behalf as well as his own. It may seem, as you say, that he did not take your feelings into consideration—as no man wants, on that level, to see his wife at all incapacitated. But in his own way, and no matter how misguided, he was trying to pace himself and his temperament with yours, to play up those mental writing abilities that would help his career, and in which you took such pride—and while doing that, play down qualities that might distract you from your own work, by encouraging physical activities—parties, vacations, travelings, that would further take up your time, when you were already taking time away from your art to help him in psychic work.

Now: Larry (Herschaft) is touched by your paintings, and by your reality as it is translated through your paintings. Your freedom as an artist will come precisely when you free yourself from identifying exclusively with that image in your relationship with yourself and the world. Then you are free to use your abilities, for your survival does not depend upon them. Do you follow me?

You each produced despite your individual and joint efforts to inhibit other areas of your life; to protect a limited, old idea of what an artist and a writer are. You may take your break.

When such an improvement of attitude does occur on Ruburt’s part, it takes considerable courage for him to take or initiate that first step—and you do not ease the way, but in the meantime go along until he makes such a suggestion first. When you finally do both go out, at the most two or three times in a row, something happens. What could it be?

Ruburt enjoys himself in the face of his condition. He is revitalized. He tries his best under the circumstances to look his perkiest, to have fun. He wants to dance, and he tries, and he does. Then all of a sudden you say, Joseph, “You are not any better. What good does it do to go out?” before you have allowed enough time, and without even acknowledging that Ruburt has lost his fear, which is the most important point of all (and which I haven’t realized)—for from that all else will follow.

They can express their personhood freely—in those areas that do not threaten their creativity, but as the idea grows, there are few areas left. Your creativity as artists is dependent upon the fulfillment of your personhood, not upon its denial. You have feelings from your backgrounds that to share is to be vulnerable, to lose what you have, and the feeling that you can save your abilities only by cutting yourselves off from others.

Some of Ruburt’s students would receive great feelings of creative endeavor if you allowed them the simple pleasure of making out envelopes for your (new) letter (to correspondents), but you are afraid of sharing that work, menial as it is. The two of you are doing what you have decided to do, and producing what you have decided to produce. You have put impediments in your way, but you are producing regardless. You are embarked upon a work that you are determined to embark upon. You are successes, whether or not you insist upon thinking of yourselves sometimes as failures.