“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(This afternoon Jane had a very revealing dream about the whole question of protection, the male aspects of her personality, etc.; a copy is attached to the session.

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.

Give us a moment.... Art always serves as some self-disclosure, in which the art stands for the person, and the art is sent abroad, for example. The art stands for more than the person. In a way it reaches higher than the person, in that it expresses dimensions of imagination or inspiration that are heroic, and often by nature it speaks of capacities that cannot be fully expressed except through art.

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.

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.

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.