“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: in The Nature of Personal Reality we discussed the nature of private beliefs. Some day there can be a book called The Nature of Cultural Reality.

Since it is formed by beliefs held by natural creatures, culture is, as Ruburt states, as natural as your physical environment. Once you are born into a particular time and country, you do grow up in an almost invisible but definite environment of concepts, assumptions, and predetermined ideas that serve as a basis from which your own individual beliefs spring. There is a constant give-and-take between any individual and his cultural system.

These previous cozy hopes of such acceptance were quite necessary to couch him as he went about his own searches, because he did not want to admit that he was, in a way, now, alone. His temperament is somewhat different than yours. You were alone in your family, but because he had no family his aloneness was so apparent that he tried to hide it.

I do not want to frighten you—but if we ever do The Nature of Cultural Reality, it will be a fine book.

Ruburt felt that anyone who went outside the established systems would meet ridicule, so he protected himself against it. He did his thing, but he set about creating an environment of “safety,” and he would not go outside of it. He would not have to deal with so-called skeptics on the one hand, nor would he allow himself to be set up as an occult priestess on the other. Nor would he be an object of ridicule to neighbors, for they would not see him that much.

(Pause at 10:40.) Put together beliefs in a hostile world and an untrustworthy self, and you end up in difficulty if you are working with other concepts that tell you that spontaneity is good and that the self is to be trusted. For in the old framework those ideas make no sense. If you do not challenge them then you never come to the point of conflict. You do not even know that you have been taught to fear your own being. It never occurs to you to trust it! You go from expert to expert in whatever field of difficulty arises, and you have far more problems than you two have. Still, things seem to mesh together, for everything is the same color gray.

(11:02.) When you begin examining the strands of beliefs, you are working with your own experience. You can make marvelous strides in one direction, and still be held back in others by webs that didn’t show up before, because you were not pressing against them.

Your own natural feelings toward him, your own natural sexual feelings, with their naturally allowed sexual gallantry, would clear that point. In the past, the long past, he discouraged your sexual gallantry in his concern for proving himself independent—and also, then, because he felt on the other hand that if he endorsed it you would feel that he was tacitly demanding conventional female protection. He has grown more wise since.

I am giving no suggestions in detail, for what you have learned should suggest its own alternate reactions. Ruburt is beginning to yearn for physical mobility, and it will come with that desire and the altered beliefs that make it possible.

(Humorously:) if you could be really correlated with my time, then you could have The Nature of Cultural Reality in no time.

(A note: It does seem a shame that Cultural Reality is there, ready for the giving or receiving. It’s transmission is a couple of years away, though, according to the way Jane and I have been producing these books. I did mention one thought to Jane that would speed things up. Simply let Seth dictate the book—any book—minus any notes on my part. Then I would only have to transcribe it and type the manuscript. Jane could write a lengthy Intro or Preface if she cared to, explaining all the mechanics, the trances, etc., connected with the book’s production.