“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.

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.

You have with all of this the natural need, again, to be accepted to some degree by your fellows, to find a point of relation, an accepted platform for relationships.

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.

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

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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