“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.

To some extent Ruburt is beginning to move in that direction now, in Psychic Politics—particularly with his codicils. First of all, of course, you do choose the culture into which you are born. The belief system is like a mental and spiritual climate. To some extent or another each individual alive alters that climate, so that even if there were no revolutions there would be constant change, sometimes gradual and sometimes sudden.

People’s beliefs do form the cultural system, which then exerts its influence upon the individual. The cultural system is not imposed however from some outside source, and it is not biologically predetermined. It has its biological aspects, of course; but war, for example, is not a biological culmination of an aggressive instinct (period).

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.

As mentioned before, he was told to slow down, told he would burn himself out before he was twenty. He climbed through belief systems with an unerring sense of direction, but as he toppled one there was always another. When he finished with the Catholic church, for example, he was certain that the secular, academic world offered the answers to the questions ignored, he felt, by religion. But that world of beliefs also was found highly limiting.

Now while this journey went on, and while he traveled through systems, disregarding, finally, one series of beliefs after another, he still carried to some degree certain basic root assumptions, held in different ways by all of those systems. Still carrying some of these himself, and with my help, he began a study of the nature of belief itself.

(Pause.) He freed himself in important areas, yet all the time struggling against certain basic seeming inconsistencies. You are also tinged by some of these beliefs as he is, for they represent those cultural colorations upon which all of your other systems are based.

Now Ruburt wrote about it just lately (in Psychic Politics?), but he still does not realize how persuasive (pervasive?) this one particular cultural belief is, and only by accepting it does his physical condition make any sense.

Now only a belief in hostility would justify such behavior. The behavior also says “Look at me. You can’t attack me because I am in such poor shape. It would not be fair play.”

As mentioned earlier, Ruburt’s sex, as Jane, was also connected, for he carried the beliefs of his culture that a woman would be ridiculed twice as quickly as a man. In the meantime he seemed to have, in a certain way, nothing concrete to offer in terms that he felt people could understand—nothing for them to grab a hold of.

The codicils will offer new hypotheses upon which private life can be based, and in this they are highly important. It is almost impossible for you, individually or together, to look back and see those beliefs you have dispensed with that were limiting, but the framework still lingered. These are ideas, then, that Ruburt must get through his head. It was necessary in the old frame of reference, that he believe his body could not work properly. It was a method of operation that allowed him to go ahead with what he felt was reasonable caution. While it limited his inner and outer potential to some degree, he still felt overall that he was going ahead as fast as he dared to.

(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.

Ruburt felt that he needed protection. He also felt he had to discipline himself because he could not trust himself, and his symptoms served, again, to keep him at his work. Your society puts great stress upon the belief that there is a division between inner and outer, physical and mental activity. It is healthy to be athletic, unhealthy to sit at your desk. Your civilization believes that the body is a mechanical organism alone. If you use it, it works. If you sit as your desk it will become stiff. So the beliefs go. Ruburt was also tinged by those concepts, so if he had to make a choice, he chose the writer’s cramp.

The symptoms were based then on beliefs that he accepted—beliefs that are all quite basic in your civilization, invisibly entwined in all of those systems he thought he had dismissed.

This is also based on cultural-sexual beliefs. He is afraid that you will not love him if he does not take the traditional woman role, and that if he does not he has no right to expect such gallantry. Both of you, however, were highly suspicious of sexuality in connection with your work, and you, Joseph, did feel it a trap, which is why you married late. Ruburt tried to hide what he thought of as characteristics that would frighten you—but the need itself was only camouflaged.

Here I want to show how invisible cultural beliefs operate individually. You know about them, so it seems you are aware. Yet you do not realize how firmly you accept them. I do not mean just you here (period).

(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.

The codicils are important because they offer a framework in which hostility is not taken for granted, and in which such behavior is not necessary. Ruburt is like a tree, growing up surely toward clear spaces. So are you. The deadwood must be cleared away, however—the old beliefs that still linger.

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.

Now—a closing remark.... Your organizational structures are based of course on cultural beliefs. I will not go into them now as they apply to organizations—but we do not need that structure. There are inner communications far more potent, and we are working with those.