“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you were both children, to some degree each of you felt that you were different because of your intense subjective activity—and to some extent, and different for both of you—you felt that you had to “fight for” the freedom to pursue subjective reality.

You believed that you should be outgoing, vigorous, somewhat competitive, and you believed you should be socially oriented, while at the same time you believed that those things conflicted in a basic way with other drives. You felt you should be introverted, have periods of isolation, time to sit and think, to write and paint, to look inward rather than outward. In periods of intense inner activity that were enjoyable and productive, you disapproved of yourselves because you were not at the same time socially oriented, vigorously involved in exercises, or physically oriented pursuits, and so you disapproved of yourselves.

You felt you could not merge the separate groups of attributes because they were diametrically opposed in your minds. Instead, of course, there are gradations of behavior, and patterns or rhythms in your lives that would naturally flow one into the other, released from the artificial polarities. The polarities are artificial, but there is no doubt that in your society and times the exterior-tuned consciousness is the most paramount. It, of course, by its nature, is not given to introspection, so it does not question its stance as deeply. So some of this disapproval has to do with your own attitudes about the attitudes of others as they view your lives.

(10:28. “Well, once again we find ourselves at odds with society,” I said to Jane as we talked. “This time it’s over exercise and related ideas. I don’t know whether to get mad at our friends, or ourselves, or both.” Actually I felt pretty resentful about the whole situation. I guess; it seemed that Jane and I were incredibly dense about understanding what had been going on for the past decade. I remarked about the opinions of others when they read our deleted material after our deaths, for instance, whereupon Jane said that more than once she’d had the idea of destroying all our personal material when we were older.

These ideas, with the last session, have to do with Ruburt’s partitioning of his spontaneity, for he also felt that you had to choose one way or the other, and that to protect your subjective freedom you had to inhibit the externally oriented spontaneity that was sanctioned by most of the society, because you could not do both. This is, again—and to some extent—on both your parts, black-and-white thinking.