“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The word combines all of his goals—physical and creative—into one clear focus in which there is no ambiguity. In a way then the word, with its intent and meaning, has tremendous power, to which the body is responding. Responsive: that word does not imply retreat. It also implies the ability to respond. The energy to act. The joints have all begun to move better. In some cases now this means, relatively speaking, slight enough motion, but highly important.

Again, his condition does represent the one area where both of you have felt cowed, often hopeless, and as if your abilities worked in all directions but that one. The important point is, that that area was the one area in which you did not use those abilities—nor should either of you spend time bemoaning what has happened, or dwelling upon “what people can do to themselves.” This is not only waste of time, but it adversely affects your creativity, and that frame of mind will never generate solutions, but only further difficulties in any area (emphatically).

As he is using it, the word “responsive” will give him freedom to respond as he wishes to the world in general, so that the two of you can make decisions. There is an overall picture you cannot see, in which you form your lives together, so that at one time you act, for example, as a unit, and on other occasions or times one acts out certain of your joint beliefs, while the other acts out another one.

Since you both held those attitudes and saw those beliefs everywhere reinforced, naturally enough in your experience, then in the overall it would be most miraculously unusual if one of you did not physically retreat. Your nature allowed you to try. You found it intolerable, and recovered. Because of Ruburt’s other characteristics personally, he tried it on for size, and found it fit with considerable chafing. But overall that way of life, to some extent has suited you both.

Some men are fools. Some men are murderers. Some people do not give a whit for your privacy or your work. Some people do not understand artists, or any creative endeavor. None of these remarks apply to all people, however, or even to a majority of people. You can, however, collect information and statistics applying to any one group, and keep collecting it until you find that you do live in a reality in which all men certainly seem to be fools, or murderers, or hostile to creative people.

(Seth’s material earlier this evening, about responsiveness to the world, in whatever form one chose, reminded me of an idea I’d mentioned to Jane last week. I’d dropped it because I became unsure of the reactions on both of our parts. The idea involved our concentration for just five minutes a day—say when we lay down for our naps—on sending out suggestions to the effect that we’d hear from people we wanted to hear from, either/or by letter or in person. Obviously the people would be well-enough known for us to have heard of them. But I’d been thinking that it might be a way to break our habits of retreat. I became concerned, though, about whether our beliefs had changed enough to make such contacts possible, or welcome to us if they did materialize.