“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After supper tonight Jane became aware of a noticeable straightening of her right leg—the shortest one —so that it appeared to equal her left leg. I measured the angle of change, of opening up, as we talked and saw a good increase. Over the last two days she’s stood taller walking, so this change had been in the works... Her right side generally has been improving from head to toe also. She has walked faster at times, and there has been improvement in the musculature definition of her knees.

I do not want to set up polarities. I do want to give you some background, however, for some of your attitudes. From childhood in your society, you were as children told in one way or another that it was healthy to enjoy sports and outside activity, to join in games, to be outgoing with playmates, and all of that is of course quite true. Children are also taught, however, that reading for anything but short periods was somehow unhealthy, that daydreaming or staying alone for anything but a brief period meant that the child was withdrawn, and that his activities—or hers—were somehow unnatural.

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.

If you believe, however, that you must have one at the expense of the other, then you will always face a dilemma between exterior and subjective activity. Your friends the Gallaghers inhibit their subjective natures strongly, both of them (as I was speculating about the other day). They are indeed afraid of aging, and so press onward in more and more exterior activity, because they fear that age will show itself there first. They forget the nature of “youthful thoughts.” They believe there is a polarity, and they have chosen the other side.

Since you are obviously able to enjoy physical activity at times, you chose to remain alone rather than “play with the others.” As you matured you each to some degree carried beliefs that physical activity and subjective activity were somehow, and to varying degrees, opposed to the other—one being accepted by society, and the other frowned upon.

(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.

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.

Physically, for example, you are in much better physical condition than Joe Bumbalo, but he is a prime example, to you, of the exteriorized consciousness—and while on the one hand you envy his shoveling the walk, you are to some degree underneath all that, somewhat contemptuous—somewhat, now; I do not want to speak too strongly, but simply help you become aware of some feelings you might have submerged because you think they are not nice.

Much of the propaganda is nearly invisible. It appears everywhere. The body and mind are one. Bates’s book, or rather philosophy, suggesting that the eyes were not made for reading, is an example of a different kind, implying that there were no books when the eye was created—and so therefore it is not natural for the eye to see letters—while it is natural for the eye to see, say, trees. The body adjusts its rhythms in a quite healthy manner to your activities, and without polarized habits of thought, periods of deep creativity will automatically be followed by periods of walking, natural exercise of one kind or another, in which subjective thought and body motion are synchronized.

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.

At certain stages your experience relatively coincides—relatively—with events in the past, so that some material attains double strength. Generally, however, your hopes and faith in Ruburt’s recovery became somewhat eroded. Your feelings of hopelessness were the result, as given in the last session, but nowhere did you thoroughly work out in the past the problems of self-disapproval; or if one managed to attain a foothold, the other did not, so you could not properly reinforce each other creatively, and became quickly discouraged.

You have both moved through many periods of understanding, where others might have stopped, and the going-ahead always involves new challenges. Your friend Bill Gallagher’s operation represented a triumph on his part, for he regained his health in one important area—an achievement of worth. But it also represented a failure of a kind, a stopping-point at a certain level of development.