“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: Ruburt’s irritability is partially physical of late. The body wants to move. Irritability is indeed in its way a sign of life and vitality. It is not passive, for example. Physically Ruburt is nervous. The nervous system is being activated. He wants to walk—and is being driven toward motion, even though his present capabilities as yet only allow him to go so far. The irritability then is a healthy, nervous reaction. The nerves are physically urging him on—hence of course the walking in the kitchen, the impatience in the chair, the odd nervous sensations in the legs and hips, and behind this, your decision again not to hide —not to be apologetic. His body is already less apologetic.

There are periods of rest necessary, so for a while Ruburt did not write down his feelings. He was tired of dealing with them. Now they are coming to the forefront again, and Ruburt is tying them into your early springtime pendulum sessions, so that some new benefits now can come from that old work.

He grew afraid of drinking, lest his inhibitions be dropped, and he began getting impressions about other people, and telling them. Several affairs frightened you both: the woman in labor, for example, and the affair in which Ruburt banged upon the table. You both felt that considerable caution had to be used. Ruburt drank considerably in class—yet always with one eye watching the other. He had to show that he had psychic abilities, but that he was in control of them. He had to prove that he was a reasonable person. He felt that you would disapprove of many class events, in those classes you did not attend—that you would think he went too far.

(10:05.) It is very possible that you would have found the emotional aura at least vaguely unpleasant on some occasions—so Ruburt always tried, because of his own feelings as well as yours, to be intuitional and intellectual at the same time. He was also afraid of making errors, because unlike other psychics, he could not simply conveniently forget them or make up a story to cover them.

Since his psychic abilities did not show themselves in a conventional fashion in his early years, he did not learn to trust them as he might have otherwise, yet this was part of the entire picture. What he is trying to do is to turn on the “high intellect,” or “spacious mind.” The high intellect or spacious mind is a combination of what you think of as psychic or intuitional, and intellectual qualities—only raised to a much higher degree, and united.

It is for this reason that he has stubbornly resisted other areas of help in his physical condition, and it is the reason that you have gone along.

(10:13.) Give us a moment.... This does involve you practically in periods of discontent, a discontent that is in its way a constant reminder that prevents you from being satisfied with lesser answers along the way. Ruburt is being led to discover that the answers to his intellectual questions about his abilities, my existence, life after death, the solution to his physical problems, can only be discovered through the appreciation and use of his intuitive and psychic abilities. He is now making that intellectual discovery.

I am not making judgments now, but showing reactions—so the two of you hid the sessions from the beginning, for example. You tried to fit the sessions into the scientific context, as you thought was right, with the testing and so forth. None of that spoke of any great emotional exhibitionism, yet both of you feared it. Ruburt has pared down his abilities (as I mentioned before the session). He has pared them down to those he could reasonably explain intellectually.

This means of course that his intellect is far more flexible than most—yet the intellect as you understand it has been conditioned to accept only a small portion of your intuitional reality. You concurred in a good bit of this, often through unspoken attitudes, and through invisible example, but you got your backs up against the world, with chips upon your shoulders.

Ruburt felt he had to explain to the world, and he began to cut off experiences that he did not intellectually find decisive answers for. This does apply to the predictions and to his attitudes toward the mail—which are highly ambiguous.

Again, a note: when Ruburt talks about his work, this is often a ruse, an excuse, to hold back from free, playful, intuitive or psychic experiences. You both like to use the word work to show others that you are not irresponsible, and that you work twice as hard as they do. This also means, however, that you inhibit natural, playful creativity and sometimes what I will call high art, because you are so obsessed with your images.

Sleeping five hours or so—for Ruburt, in any case—right now is good, because his body wants to move by then, and soreness and irritability begin toward morning as a rule for that reason and at this stage.

Creative work must transcend time, and when he is writing well, time is forgotten. His poem last night took a good full 20 minutes (with amused irony). That cannot be compared in any way with the amount of work done by someone in a normal eight-hour day. Someone could work at a poem for eight hours, and have nothing. He wrote the poem because he felt like it—scandalous behavior—and also because he had expressed his feelings and written them down.

Both he and his customers follow the same psychic map. The readings give a certain comfort. They cannot be proven or disproven. The medium, for example, has not opened up into the higher intellect, for he will not question enough to truly discover the point where the intellect can go no further.

He is not besieged by doubts, either, and often his insights are good and helpful. On the other hand, many of his customers of course must look further, and despite themselves realize that this bit of truth is a pretty postcard, in James’s words, and they yearn for some kind of a deeper originality—an authenticity, a spark of something that will be instantly recognized.