“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.

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.

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.

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.

Your interests place you in a position in which you question the theories of your times, and the people who uphold those theories are not about to seek you out. You do not realize the exhilarating nature, again, of your own endeavors in comparison to those of, say, the majority.