“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: comments concerning several areas. First of all, generally pertaining to yourself. You have been trained, like most of your contemporaries, to deal with an unsafe universe—to hold your own amid tumultuous threats—social, economic, spiritual or otherwise.

Ruburt’s methods of dealing with such a situation were highly apparent, in his physical symptoms. Yours were not as easy to perceive. They did not show. In an unsafe universe you run your personal life along certain lines. This applies generally more or less, and specifically to you also. In that context you do not trust good fortune—indeed, it seems practical not to trust it. You hide good fortune for fear it will be taken away. It does not seem to belong in an unsafe universe. You do not tell people that you are doing well—you tell them that you must work from morning to night; that you do not have enough time. You have to prove that you are as hassled as they are.

(9:40.) You have built up the idea of free time being wrong, sinful, no matter what you tell yourself about wanting more of it. That is one thing. Deeper, however, is the fact that the belief in an unsafe universe sets up certain habits of resistance, and more practically, of self-protection. The resistance is protective. It shows itself in fears that seem perfectly realistic, and indeed highly practical—the feeling itself is not let go of easily, for you and others rely upon it. It is a state of alarm and readiness. You are so used to feeling unsafe that you consider alarm of one kind or another as a realistic approach to life.

The body is then pushed in different directions, with resulting strain. Before, you would accept that threat as realistic. The entire context of the unsafe universe protects itself by comments such as “It is too good to be true,” where any good is immediately suspect, while bad effects are considered quite natural.

(To me:) Your symptoms have been reassuring to the portion of you that habitually followed the old line of thinking. The reasoning falls thusly: “Everything is going well. The books are selling. Ruburt is definitely improving. With so much right, something must go wrong, or things would not go right,” meaning realistic. Beside this the dis-ease serves to protect you from the frightening “fear” that if everything goes well something must be wrong, because in an unsafe universe that is a belief. So you provide a “little” wrong to preserve the larger good.

There, you have made some good strides. Your good strides there, however, led to your momentary-enough concern with New York City’s economic fate. Your beliefs in the safe universe are spreading. That is why you used the symptoms “just in case.” In the unsafe universe, however, you—not you alone—believe that something good will be fought over. The books prove their merit in that reality, because they are fought over to whatever degree.

At John’s level, and in his unsafe universe, the events still prove how valuable the books are, since, to whatever extent, they are fought over. At Ruburt’s level and your own, the events show you that the universe, as it applies to your publishing world is safe—with leeway for action—and also opens up creative relationships with people at Prentice that were latent before. Now, these become “practical,” where before they were not considered so. This means that a great deal of energy is released.

Worrying about taxes, again to whatever degree, is the same sort of thing. It is as if you can trust your abundance only if you can prove to yourselves that there is a threat connected with it, or say “After all, it is not all that good.” These are all examples, yet they point out habitual reactions that belong to the unsafe universe, that seem appropriate and realistic there.

Now about Pocket Books. Interesting and amusing. The woman there (Pat Golbitz) picked up all of your own negative ideas—yours and Ruburt’s—about Fell and Prentice, and aimed them at John (Nelson). This confirmed John’s belief that he is not understood. He would not feel it safe to be understood in an unsafe world.

Your own will appear in a burst of greater creative freedom. You did not have symptoms in the past—and now they are minimal. Your belief in an unsafe universe however was reflected in a dampening of your creative abilities in contrast to what you can produce. As your beliefs change completely, as they are, you will then experience a far greater creative freedom and release from the tyranny of time that those beliefs brought about.