“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now Ruburt was always a rebel in this life. At the same time he possessed the natural urges to be loved and accepted by his fellow men.

(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.)

He has an ability to identify with others, and communicate. He has always been mentally quick and intellectually agile. As a youngster the messages from others came so quickly that he was diagnosed as having an overactive thyroid gland. Actually, he was receiving “unofficial” messages that are usually neurologically censored. He could not allow them to become conscious in that world.

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.

When our material began he was still convinced that science offered such a convenient framework. So, really, were you. A new science, certainly—parapsychology—but a recognized system, though perhaps avant-garde.

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.

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.

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.

Ruburt suddenly found himself then exploring very strange grounds indeed—and without the earlier sustaining hope. For all the recognized systems were wanting. He did not have to examine each one minutely, for his abilities, after some familiarization, left him with the knowledge of their merits. The stated discernible hypotheses of the various systems are one thing—but their invisible root assumptions are something else. Ruburt tried to put his understanding to practical use in terms of daily life, your relationship, work, finances, his classes, yet he found himself with definite physical hassles. You have encountered them through your relationship with him. In certain areas you both have blazed ahead. Those deeply seated, invisible, cultural assumptions still operated, however. Some of them you both dismissed for the very simple reason that they never temperamentally suited you to begin with. Others you dismissed because you grew in wisdom.

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.

(10:21.) To one extent or another you both believe your world is hostile. You (pointing to me) do not believe that nature is hostile, nor does Ruburt, but you both accept the concept that there are hostile elements against which you must protect yourselves, and that the artist or writer, or any sensitive wise person is at a great disadvantage against a system in which he is born, and that he is to some extent at its mercy.

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.

The body’s discomfort as he wrote would also tone down his inner pursuits enough so that he could intellectually handle them.

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.

In your system insanity means uncontrolled behavior largely, so he began putting more and more control upon his physical actions, so that no one could say his work was the result of instability. He tried not to appear nervous, but in control, while he was temperamentally and physically fast.

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 body is a miraculous organism, changing in every moment. He believes that if it is not used “properly” it will not work correctly.

(Long pause at 10:51.) He believes that he should use it on the one hand, therefore, and not use it on the other, for if he uses it “properly,” how can he be sitting at his desk?

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.

There is more. You do things for him. These gestures, these helping gestures, serve as sexual reassurance. You prized his independent nature so, and you are so temperamentally different in certain ways, that he was ashamed at asking for reassurance of your love—though he knew you loved him. He wants you to open the car door out of old-fashioned gallantry. Instead you do it because he cannot do it, seemingly, well himself.

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.

If Ruburt now and then wants to cry on your shoulder, let him, and comfort him. It is natural enough when his body hurts. He would not do it freely, and only because he tries to hide such tears from you does the emotion seem so lonely. He is afraid you are afraid, as you are. But the feeling is never let go properly or healthily, and it is a natural reaction—not threatening at all.

Its restraint holds back other expressions of love on both of your parts, and of laughter. The body condition itself will respond as this session is understood. You have made preliminary necessary changes. He actively wants to move about here, inside and out. He is moving somewhat faster overall, and overall he is somewhat straighter, though not always. You are each afraid of giving much notice, however, for fear you will be mislead. He would go in stores more, but he is afraid of humiliating you.

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....)