“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In his own way Ruburt has used symptoms as what he considered a safe framework in which to explore those areas he wanted to explore. While he experienced you, as given much earlier in the sessions, as cautionary and repressive, then he did not need the symptoms. He trusted you to set safe bounds on his spontaneity. This, he felt, relieved him of that “responsibility.”

He was bound and determined to explore the nature of reality. He wanted to protect himself against self-delusion, of going too fast too soon, until he had enough knowledge to know what he was doing. He trusted most of my material, but he could not entirely trust me because I was part of the trip.

You believed in them so strongly that he felt he must himself exert those disciplinary tendencies that you earlier displayed for him. Indeed, as he became more aware of the little that is known, he wondered at his own daring. There was no one he could go to for instruction. [...]

When he saw that he could become a personality, and how willingly others would follow, he became aware of a new kind of responsibility. [...] He also began to see two poles in society—one highly conventional, closed, in which he would appear as a charlatan; and another, yearning but gullible, willing to believe anything if only it offered hope, in which his activities would be misinterpreted, and to him, fraudulent.

[...] He fears for the gullibility of people, and is rightly appalled at their superstitions, as indeed you are, Joseph. [...] When in the beginning you were cautious, and worried about his overdoing it, or going into trance at the drop of a hat, he relied upon you in that way. When your enthusiasm grew, and your trust in his abilities, then he felt that to voice any fears at all in your eyes meant that he did not trust his abilities himself.

[...] He has been afraid to go ahead. He is not one to compromise, and compromise has caused the physical condition. [...] When he thinks he might try an out-of-body at a nap, have him tell you, and call him at a certain time. [...]

There was a middle ground that he would have to make for himself. To do this he felt he needed to exert caution, to emphasize his own doubts in order to make a bridge to those intellectuals who doubted, and yet maintain some freedom and spontaneity in order to reach those at the other end.

[...] He trusts me far more than he did. [...] Whenever a fear spontaneously comes into his mind about his work, he should voice it to you. [...]

[...] He feels that he is supposed to be an authority, telling people to go ahead, and so fear should be beneath him. [...] He is spontaneously critical, but critically spontaneous.

[...] Those who were led by their hopes into gullibility could relate to his experiences—yet he would pull them back to “sanity” by his doubts. At the same time he would be expressing the unreconciled portions of his own nature.