“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane, as Seth, pointed to our kitchen door. She could see it from her position in the living room. I’d propped it open enough so that our cat, Willy, could get in when he felt like it.)

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.

The next was the system of science. And for some time he felt it to be a framework in which man could discover the truth about himself, and his relationship with the universe—but always there was the hope that some established system was there someplace. So while he rebelled against any given framework he was also certain that one did exist.

His early religious friends quickly turned away when he left the church. He was kicked out of college, and another bridge, he felt, had fallen down. Science fiction for a while offered science plus writing—a convenient platform. But the science fiction writers he met, and the field itself, he soon found as highly limiting.

(9:58.) For a while, though he would not admit it, he felt that he would be welcomed with open arms by someone, meaning some system. The spiritualists, he found, would do so, and made overtures. The so-called occult groups would also, with their Gnostic brotherhoods. All he had to do was translate his experience into their terms, as before he felt he was expected to translate it into conventional religious, academic, or scientific terms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(Jane said she thought the idea a good one. She also said that she felt our method to date had been “a very necessary one” for us—notes and all. It does seem Seth could do a book without notes. He would just proceed through each chapter, or session....)