“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:00.) For one thing, you do not respect position, and your attitudes are clear, through your notes and Ruburt’s introductions. You do not play up whatever “important” contacts you have made. Ruburt could easily have given impressions concerning, say, Richard Burton, to Goodheart (Bill), who would have been initially impressed, and would have spread the word. Ruburt disdains such maneuvers.

You have little patience, jointly, with that kind of world. The Hollywood director (Alan Neuman) who called, for example. Ruburt was warm, curious, and solitary. He did not reinforce the director’s sense of his own importance, and the man was used to that. Nor did he speak in the honeyed spiritual tones that the man expected from the psychics he dealt with.

Flattery is no social crime. It is a psychological art of its own, taken for granted in all circles. You do not flatter others in personal encounters. You make no effort to cultivate the kind of characteristics involved. Ruburt has them, and ignores them. Some important people, in your terms, do not contact you personally except on rare occasions. Those who bang at your doors are the antisocial, the drifters, the troubled, or those so enthusiastic that they also ignore all social rules, in which case you two rise up in arms.

Ruburt is verbal. He loves to talk. He likes to hear you talk. Oftentimes your stomach upsets you because your love for Ruburt makes you concerned, and in most instances the stimulus is money. An occasion will arise, or a period of time, in which your love for him wants to find expression. You do this by expressing your concern that his work is not being duly appreciated in monetary terms (as I did this evening).

You might feel he is being taken advantage of. You do not say “I love you. I admire your work so that I want to see it duly appreciated.” Verbally oriented, Ruburt hears only an implied order, or criticism. The conflict with the stomach always involves money, however—taxes sometimes, for example—and implies a period or situation in which you think he is being taken advantage of.

You are particularly sensitive here because of the male beliefs of your culture, and the feeling that Ruburt’s books are his rather than, say, yours. You want to show him that you appreciate that by your concern, but you do not express the love verbally half as much. Period.

Ruburt’s work straddles all these issues—that is, it involves all of them at different times. Your stomach problem is basically the result of your feelings about what you consider to be a lack of communication, a blocking of your natural love. From your background, regardless of your intellectual beliefs, now, you learned to mask your expressions of love or exuberance, lest they be misunderstood. You learned to express love through worry or concern.

When you think that Ruburt is being taken advantage of then by the world, in any way involving money, then you feel guilty that you do not use painting to procure money.

(10:43.) Your stance with the world is involved. Behind it all, however, is the feeling that you do not express your love verbally, or through touch, to Ruburt, so that instead you look out for ways that feel he is being taken advantage of; and through that concern, you express your love. He does not understand this.

Intellectually he accepts it, but emotionally he yearns for that direct expression. The child may think “My teeth are fine, why yell at me to brush them?” Ruburt thinks “What is there that allows you to speak your concern more actively than your love?” He is verbally oriented. Words have rhythm—emotional rhythms, to which he is acutely attuned. You are saying “I love you. My art is, for whatever reasons, private. I respect it. It involves a method of expression, and a primary stance of my life, regardless of what it brings or does not bring. I am sorry that somehow I cannot use it in the way that you use your writing, and even in the way that I can use mine. When I think that others take advantage of you in monetary terms—government, publisher, or public—it makes me wonder why. I wish that my painting could bring you abundance in social ways also. I feel guilty sometimes when I paint for that reason. I know that you understand on deep levels. I wish I could express my love verbally, but if not, I will express it is this fashion.”

(11:21.) Ruburt responds to people, however, more than you. Your feelings about the world—to some extent—are mental and hypothetical. You isolate yourself from people in a way that he does not. Since he is more emotionally outgoing and literal-minded, he cannot close himself off emotionally in that regard. In a way, he is not using discrimination. You use an emotional aloofness with the world, and he has become physically aloof instead.

You do not expect the world to understand good work. You expect the artist, in whatever field, who is truly good, to be shunted aside. Your own hopes rise despite those beliefs, and have worked for you. But you have felt jointly that it was unsafe to trust the world; unrealistic; and while you could maintain a mental isolation, Ruburt adopted a physical one.

Your love since then has found more direct expression, and I am not obviously saying that that indirectness of expression is responsible for Ruburt’s symptoms—but only to state that your expressed concern in many instances, without the direct expression of love, reinforces the idea of threat or insecurity.

(11:45.) Ruburt’s own papers, written lately, give his side of the question, explaining why he would react in such a fashion.

So will seeing small groups of people now and then, where Ruburt can have a session if he feels like it.

Put into practice the last session, particularly with Ruburt playing with his ideas, instead of concentrating upon his work. (Louder:) Amen.