“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Today we were visited —unannounced—by a young man named Jim Poett, who has been assigned to interview Jane for The Village Voice. We talked to him for at least a couple of hours. This wasn’t an interview: he is to call Jane in a couple of weeks about that procedure, after he’s read more of her work. Jane gave him our unlisted phone number. The Voice is a New York City newspaper.

Ruburt’s creativity not only involves that kind of behavior, but the mystic elements of the personality, meaning that the inner activity is very intense, so that Ruburt learned from a young age to develop a certain kind of secrecy. His poetry was largely mystical poetry, and though he did not dwell upon the fact, he realized that this vast inner reality of his was quite beside the point of living as far as other people were concerned.

To some extent, he tried to emulate their behavior—that is, to behave the way they did, while at the same time he intently pursued a rather adventuresome inner psychic existence. That existence was expressed in the personality, but not in the normal conversation with the boys he dated, or with his friends. In early years, the church did serve as a structure. When he left it, however, he was without such a structure, and when he did discuss such matters with the priests, they often had more pragmatic sexual interests in mind.

He became quite good at expressing this inner life regardless of other circumstances, and the situation at home, and he understood that it was at odds with what was expected. It was the most vital area of his life, so quite on his own he decided that he would forgo motherhood and a conventional family life.

A good deal of the time, he hid his own decisions from himself. His nature is open—basically trustful, and direct in its dealings with the world and others. He began to find, of course, that the world could react quite differently to openness and trust. He has great powers of concentration, as indeed all mystics do, and everything in his environment becomes charged and important.

The strong private nature leads to personal discoveries, and his basically direct way of dealing with the world means that he wants to share those discoveries. He often feels that he needs protection against that same world, for while he shares so much with his fellows. He still feels basically apart from them in important ways.

(9:35.) Give us a moment.... If you recall, Ruburt could chatter quite well, and carry on in a more or less normal manner while brooding deeply about something, and saying nothing. He was bound to publish his work—any kind—but equally determined to protect his private nature. The secretness meant that he could hide his intent from himself for some time. Most people, as I mentioned, experience their contacts with the world through many prepared structures—that of church, community, clubs, professional organizations, family affiliations, academic affiliations—and these frameworks serve automatically to cushion such contact, and in a way, while permitting contact with the world, also blunting it to some extent. In that respect, most individuals do not stand alone, and, in that respect Ruburt feels that except for you he does, and must meet the world “head-on” when there is such conflict.

He did not want to be put in the position in which he felt he had to put his self-respect on the line. He did not like the public aspects that he felt confronted him. There was no ready fellowship in the psychic field, in which he felt he could take part. At the same time he felt that he should indeed go abroad—out into the public arena, and that he was cowardly for not doing so.

He is quite gifted in dealing with people, however, and in that respect he is a born teacher. To some extent that kind of activity gives his conscious mind something to concentrate upon during creative periods of incubation.

His fear of the spontaneous self originally developed simply because that self seemed so different from other people that he tried to keep it within bounds. He tried to tie it to writing alone, which was the closest approximation he could make to creative conventional activity, while still allowing himself expression. His own abilities, again, kept working through all of the frameworks, however, and none of them could content him.

The mystic is primarily concerned with a one-point relationship to the universe. Ruburt used to feel as a child threatened by crowds. He did not like to sit close to others. The two of you maintain a psychic distance from others, even your closest friends. In a way the symptoms are a statement of the distance Ruburt wanted to maintain from public life, because he felt equally that he should go out into the world in a public manner, and “tackle it.”

If he were free of fear, it seemed to him, he would do so. Ruburt, however, deals well with individuals, as in class; while preserving his privacy he still extended it. He enjoyed radio, even on your tours, because he spoke from a concealed viewpoint, where his person was concealed. The secret elements of his personality rise up against the public connotations of standing before the crowd. This is not necessarily a fear, say, of performing inadequately, nor a fear of exposure in ordinary terms. It is a distaste for being surrounded by the public emotions.

In other periods, for example, there were acceptable frameworks through which mystics expressed themselves, and most cultures have such avenues. In times of transition the old avenues no longer serve. Ruburt has no exterior framework to judge his subjective experience against, for even when he was in the church his experience did not fit the mold.

Your society teaches a basic distrust of the self, but even then from their organizations people look for a sense of approval. While relying upon himself, Ruburt still had no guidelines, and to some extent he felt that he had to rein himself in, to go cautiously, and he began to doubt himself. Even science fiction was not large enough, imaginatively, to contain his abilities, and when those abilities did indeed flower he was afraid he was more of an outcast than ever.

While trusting himself enough to use the abilities—and in a largely uncongenial social atmosphere—he still found it necessary to be highly critical, and not to rely upon the abilities too much, lest he was unknowingly as deluded as many people would certainly say he was. That meant, however, that to some degree he cut himself off from solutions that the abilities themselves could provide.