“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The person, therefore, often “cannot live up to his art.” Ruburt wants to embody his art. He expects himself to possess all of the qualities that his art tries to entice from human nature. If man can be a natural healer, and he says so, then he personally should heal others and himself. That is his reasoning. If he is gifted with words in writing, and gifted in speech, then he feels that he should go out bravely into the public arena, and speak out his message to the world.

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.

This is the same person who on the other hand used to put up barriers of bookcases at one end of the living room to protect himself from any neighbors or miscellaneous callers; who objected when Mr. Gottlieb dared to cross into his private working area and glance at a paper. In the face of those fears, Ruburt did progress from someone who was afraid to read poetry to friends, to someone who ran an excellent class of nearly 50 people—all of the time denying that any fears existed. Not faced, the fears grew.

Now, to some extent, in pragmatic terms, you must look at your backgrounds. Your father greatly distrusted the public and public events. When his battery shop closed and the public turned to the new inventions, that made his livelihood passe. He disliked the public from that moment on, and felt resentful toward those whose pictures he took, that his livelihood would be at the expense of their favor.

Ruburt decided to brazen it through—to do his thing and be paid for it. At the same time Ruburt carried the fears mentioned. He hoped for the world’s approval, for he knew his work was good. On the other hand he carried the beliefs of this afternoon’s dream—that originality made a person instantly suspect, and that in the ordinary world, if you put yourself in the world’s eye its people would hunt you down. In opposition, he carried the belief that he should go on television, make tours, and so forth, and expose himself in direct opposition to those fears.

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.

In a strange fashion because of his fears, now—and these particular fears can be countered with communications with the unconscious, and with understanding—he was afraid simply that so many people knew of his existence. To some extent that would have been involved no matter what field of endeavor he chose, if he became well-known.