“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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was somehow unhealthy, that daydreaming or staying alone for anything but a brief period meant that the child was withdrawn, and that his activities—or hers—were somehow unnatural.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.

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.

(11:09.) You believed to some degree—varying degrees, but jointly—that subjective activity and creative activity must be achieved at the expense of some physical expression. You obviously did not fall for that to the extent Ruburt did —and all of this must be considered also in the light of the religious and scientific views, with Ruburt particularly, in which the spontaneous self was considered the psychological villain of the society and the individual. The spontaneous self is the guardian—that is what Ruburt is learning.

The Gallaghers trust spontaneity only when it is expressed through physical motion. To some extent, again, Ruburt trusted it only when it was expressed through subjective motion. I suggested that you take walks, Joseph, some time ago, simply to rearouse your natural love of that activity.

(11:34 PM. Jane had “just slightly that sicky feeling” in her stomach, as she sometimes does when the material is particularly good. She immediately turned on television to get her mind off the feeling. I thought the session was excellent.)