“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.

(9:44. I closed the door and turned off the night light. Willy was already eating.)

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.

(10:10. It had been a fast delivery as far as my note-taking capacity was concerned. Jane held up her empty glass; before the session I’d filled it with equal parts of wine and water.)

(As I took Jane’s glass in my left hand she grabbed my right hand and shook it vigorously. As Seth she was most amused while she stared at me.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

(11:09.) You can decide that you like to work alone—that you do not want to do tours—not because the world is hostile, but simply because that is your way. When the phone rings it is the hostile world out there, so it seems. That was what your father (to me) thought when his phone rang.

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.