“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Notes before session: My sportsman self. My writing and painting selves. Father’s secrecy and my identification. My financial contribution. Jane’s fears. Our creative errors. Our attitudes re Prentice. Our attitudes re correspondence. Jane’s flexibility. Her dancing. My selling paintings. Mother.

You believed the painting self had to be protected. For one reason, you identified your painting creative self with your father, and you felt that he had had to protect his creative self in the household from your mother. As these ideas became entrenched, you actually became more concerned with protecting your ability than with using it. You spent more mental energy setting up barriers to protect it, so that any one instance, say, of interruption or conflict, would immediately arouse the power of the buried fear, and become a symbol for it. You learned repression. Therefore, free time was not enjoyed creatively. You could not paint freely in it, for you were so on guard against distractions that anything could distract you.

Because of that specialized, limited focus, however, to varying degrees each of you were divided within yourselves. Ruburt feared that the psychic work conflicted with the writer, and detracted from you in your focus as an artist. This was apparent in the most minute circumstances, and colored your lives. Did Ruburt feel like making love during your working hours in earlier years, you actively discouraged him, and told him through actions and words that displays of innocent affection turned you on sexually, and disturbed you when you wanted to paint.

He, when he had reached the point where he will go out again, is by then defiant, angry, joyous and exultant by turns. Each dance is a victory because he first had to get over the fear of walking to the dance floor, and he looks hopefully to you for your support that he does not look too badly. He yearns for any sign of your approval, and sexual recognition.

Ruburt’s writing abilities have blossomed because of his psychic experience. Your painting abilities have also. You have not acknowledged that because the paintings have not brought money; you did not want to believe they were valuable, for fear someone would take them away. In a strange manner, you saw to it that your abilities found precisely the elements that would release them, yet your ideas of the writer and the artist prevented you from seeing this.

Ruburt used his body as a symbol of the entire situation, and the symptoms as a way of maintaining privacy, and lack of distraction on both of your parts—again, inhibiting sexual freedom, spontaneous outings that threatened both of your ideas. He would go so far, throw out test balloons, and meet with your disapproval. The disapproval was yours, and you saw his fears projected upon you. You were both happy when he showed some improvement, because neither of you wanted physical disability carried too far, but as soon as he showed signs of being free enough so that he could really take a trip, or dance, you both clamped down. He always waited to see what you would do, and these episodes, again, occurred after enough improvement, so that first he wanted to go out. Sometimes he forced himself to, thinking he was denying you the pleasure of your bars and outings. But despite what you said, he saw that you did indeed disapprove.

After not going out for a while the fear would reassert itself, of looking ridiculous and facing people, so there would a time until he again became defiant and conquered it. The love of the sportsman for motion can instead be used to encourage him toward physical performance. He saw, the day that you slept (last Saturday, January 26) that he is always afraid of his performance in your eyes—that he gets up more often when you are not watching. This natural love of good bodily performance however can indeed be used, and most effectively to your joint advantage once you realize its source.

Now. The psychic work, which is a natural extension of both of your creative abilities, could not be fully utilized by you, individually or jointly, while you maintained such a rigid, specialized focus. Ruburt feared that it might be taking you from your one true purpose as a painter. Not realizing, either of you, your financial contribution through the works, you felt and so did he, after Artistic, that he carried the brunt financially.

(In here, I had to laugh as Seth spoke. Not in mockery, but rather in bewilderment at the seemingly endless paths that a chain of thought, once undertaken, could follow. I wondered if Jane and I could ever untangle the paths. As I told her later that evening when we lay in bed: the session seemed to chronicle a list of fears.)

Giving himself psychic spontaneity might mean somehow giving into that spontaneity that both of you feared. Whenever psychic developments show themselves then, Ruburt improves in health, as he allows his energies their spontaneous play and expression. This flows into his writing, his physical condition, and your private lives.

Now. While you smile at me, you still think that you must protect yourself against distractions, as if they are purposely lined up like enemies against you. This has nothing to do with consciously deciding how you want to spend your time, but with those inner fears that make you think of your time as something that must be protected—that considers your talent so fragile that it will wither if you do not make great effort to protect it.