“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

You felt that commercial art would work financially, because it belonged to the times, yet even then the comic book market, you felt, was falling beneath you as the public’s ideas changed, and (Mickey) Spillane’s comic strip fell beneath censure. You simply would not, later, curry the world’s favor with your paintings—even if, through hard work, financial success might follow. You did not trust people to know good work when you produced it.

(Along in here I had an insight as I wrote, no doubt triggered by Seth’s material. It was that although Jane’s eye condition might be caused by my delays with getting “Unknown” Reality to the public, another reason was also involved: namely, that she saw the revealing notes I did for “Unknown” as a threat also.)

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.