“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we sat for tonight’s session we made two important connections; 1. When the refrigerator turned itself off I expressed relief at the sudden quiet. But Jane said the silence bothered her—the kind of remark I’ve always heard her make. Then she said that as a young child she was always uneasy at home when it was too quiet—that those were the times when she worried about what her mother was up to. When Marie had been making noise, involved in noisy activities, Jane had felt much better, safer. 2. This insight led Jane to an obvious one neither of us had ever made before: that when she gets a letter in which the writer threatens suicide if Jane doesn’t help him or her, this is like Marie threatening the young Jane that she will commit suicide.)

I want to begin, however, by making some rather neutral but important points. You age of communications has significantly altered public and private life, so that for example by mail Ruburt might receive as many petitions as the king of a country in times past. People of no other age, historically speaking, have had to contend with the dimensions of public exposure that are now possible.

The public man, the man of letters, et cetera in other centuries, and the public man say of Rome, or of the Middle Ages, or of the 19th Century, involved personal interactions with the public, but in very limited, controlled situations. The private image of the person was largely unknown. A king could travel through his own lands and not be recognized if he wanted it that way, for no television screen flashed his image into the homes of his people. The line between the public and the private was much more clearly drawn. There is much more that could be said, but I simply here want to mention that such issues demand far more of a gifted personality.

I am not making value judgments of my own here in the following remarks. His subconscious, however, knowing its own beliefs which were given it by the conscious self, after all, feels highly threatened, for it knows not more about Ruburt than he does, but more than Ruburt will admit he knows. He expects himself to do such things, and the minute he gets better, he says, he will go thusly out into the world.

The exaggerated fears carried threats not simply of scorn, but as you so clearly put it the other evening “Those people would burn us at the stake if they had the chance.” To save Ruburt from such possible assassination, the symptoms were not considered too strong a measure. But in the face of that kind of exaggerated threat they were considered very strict, but reasonable enough under the conditions. The subconscious was not too pleased with them.

(10:15. I told Jane about my insight, involving her eyes and “Unknown” Reality. She agreed. We’d finished with Volume 1 in early 1977—February, say, and she recalled that by March she’d started having eye trouble. But what’s the connection between eyes and the threat of exposure? I told her she didn’t have to answer the question now. It should be listed, though.

(Jane was getting that “slightly sicky feeling in my stomach” as we talked about fears. I got her a glass of milk. “I’ll do what I can about the session,” she said. She was yawning again and again. I reminded her of my two questions from Monday’s session, plus the one about my reaction to the mail today. Seth didn’t go into the first two, but the following material did have to do with reactions to those who wrote us. Resume at 10:27.)

Now: Ruburt has had nearly enough for this evening, considering today’s activities, but I will get to all of your questions in the very near future.

You have those down, but I want to mention some matters you are not aware of.

Ruburt became frightened, for example, of out-of-body travel when he began to get it in his head that “all the nuts” were doing it too, and that out-of-body activity involved him in an inner public environment, in which he might meet “all those fools” who were then not bound by physical restraints. He did not fear death, for example, at the hands of others, then, but too close emotional contact. He felt people “could get at him” that way.

Give us a moment.... Fears turn into severe anxiety, however, formless, when they are not identified and understood. The Silent Gallery people epitomized Ruburt’s fears in a fashion, and though I have given material in several ways pertaining to the fears, Ruburt never consciously acknowledged them, but shoved them under. The subconscious should be reminded of the help that is available from the source self, for its fears began before it had that information, and the fears themselves caused blocks that prevented assimilation of the knowledge later.