“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You want to examine life, to experience it, and yet in some way find in time a safe dimension apart from time. What you want is a second life in life, in which to appreciate and examine life’s experience. The ordinary distractions of life immediately then cause conflict. On the one hand, they are living, these distractions. They are life. On the other hand, they rob you in time of that second life you want, in which to examine your experiences.

Now obviously, if you cut down distractions, or all experiences, there would be little left to enjoy or examine. You both tried to find a framework in which you could have two lives at once in that regard—and putting those two together is taking some doing.

Since you set yourselves such a course, then you obviously have a certain responsibility to both lives. They are your creations, after all. Almost all of Ruburt’s difficulty with time, and your own, spring from this basic quandary. For most people do not try that hard to preserve the living moment, or to understand it, while they are still involved with time’s physical package. Hence, to some extent your difficulties with “Unknown”—that is, with the notes—for you are trying to fit one dimension into another. A bold venture, and one that fits in quite will with your intents jointly to understand and preserve fleeting reality, and one that conflicts with your attempts to do this in the context of one physical time that passes.

Think of the entire 24-hour period, however. If the two of you stick together, there will be no problem, and particularly if you view this not as a schedule but as a way in which you want to mix time and timelessness, and merge the “two lives” that each of you try to live in the one life. Distractions may occur, but you can deal with them if your attitudes are clear, and if you see that overall you are doing what you want. Then any distractions will not be that important.

On the other hand, he becomes upset if people cannot make truth work in literal terms. He is very touchy on that point, and yet he becomes very angry if people try to make truth too practical. Why can’t truth make people want to live? Why can’t truth be used as a prescription? The suicide story bothered him simply because it reminded him of Will (Ives), who had attended classes, and of a friend of Venice’s, who committed suicide many years ago, although a session was held for her.

The story in the paper rearoused those old conflicts. But truth involves insights of a most peculiar kind, for they cannot indeed be truly specified, and the more specific you try to make them the more you distort them, or the more you dilute their original power. You make your own reality. You cannot force an individual to live, nor can you force him to die, through the use of the truth. One and one is two—that is a fact in your world, and you can use that fact in millions of ways, but it involves no truth.

Man lives through the desire for life. That truth is a far more important realization. People can use our books, but the greatest use is a kind of mental, spiritual, and psychic acceleration that allows them to use all of their abilities better—but they must decide how they will use truth.

Ruburt’s feelings after his nap involve the material given earlier, primarily on two lives in one, but also are based upon old feelings you are now handling in your pendulum work, that are in the process of being resolved but the strong time elements are strongly involved.