“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Children were urged in one way or another to be aggressive, competitive, and generally to fit the conventional idea of the extrovert. It often seemed that there was no in-between point, and if you did not fit one mold, you must therefore take your stand and be the other.

(10:05.) I do not want to duplicate material. At one time, however, you briefly curtailed physical activity for what you considered the sake of your subjective freedom. You quickly dismissed that idea after a taste of it. Ruburt accepted that idea, believing he must make a choice. All of this, you see, must be considered in the light of our last session, for it involves varying degrees of self-disapproval and polarities of thought, so that the contradictions occurred in your experience—though there were more, of course, in basic terms.

(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.

(In addition. Prentice-Hall will send us additional copies of Seven, if they have any left. Larry Davidson called from San Francisco, during which he agreed to ship us some copies from the bookstore where he works. This the day or so after I’d had the idea of calling him to ask him to do this.

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.

This summer, you compared your way of life with those polarized ideas, with the way of life of the construction men, for example. The disapproval causes you to exaggerate the differences, rather than glorify them as you should —though glorify may be too strong a word. Ruburt’s physical condition becomes a materialization of those concepts, exaggerated, so that he is not able to go forth in the world, believing the polarity so great, with him and subjective activity having the disadvantage.