“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.)

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.

(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.

(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.

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.