“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(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.

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.

(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 self is not trustworthy. That is another root assumption behind all of your systems, and here Ruburt was experimenting with that self.

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.

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.