“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The same applied to Ruburt. You chose challenges, then, because despite it all your personalities are the kind that set up such life situations to begin with. Your abilities would meet some conflict in terms of religious, sexual, and social beliefs. This conflict would in a certain fashion sharpen the issues. To meet with these, Ruburt for example adopted certain beliefs that at various times would be helpful.

He protected himself against early marriage or child bearing by identifying the male writer to some extent with his own writing image. This provided needed leeway in the formation of his ideas, and allowed him to leap free of the stereotyped beliefs about femininity that otherwise could have hampered him. The novelist, the science fiction writer—these were male images needed in the time of his youth.

Because of your individual and joint intuitive understanding and intellectual discrimination, you were able from an early age to clearly perceive the difficulties of your fellows. This helped incite stimuli that made you question the entire framework of your civilization. You were able to do something few people can: leap intuitively and mentally above your own period—to discard intellectually and mentally, and sometimes emotionally, the shortsighted, unfortunate religious, scientific and social beliefs of your fellows.

Many of those old beliefs, however, still have an emotional hold, and some helpful beliefs have been overdone, or carried on too long. Because you see so clearly the failings of your age, you each have a tendency to exaggerate them, or rather to concentrate upon them, so that you do not have an emotional feeling of safety.

There were certain beliefs of yours together, again, that once served a purpose. They kept you from “falling for” certain temptations in society. These worked well for some time. When you found yourselves able to buy a house, however, both of you experienced some conflict because of those beliefs, held over too long.

It is, therefore, the result of beliefs once helpful carried beyond their time —of defenses no longer needed. It also represents one area where neither of you truly believe that the point of power is in the present. In that one area you grant the power to the past.

Now people do the same thing in all areas of their lives. The beliefs involved in your case were particularly “tricky,” because they were initially part of your private and joint experience, meant to be helpful. Ruburt did distrust the body because it was female—a belief quite helpful, if distorted, when he was 15 or 16 years old, or even in his 20’s.