“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In Turkey you dealt with an order rather than a family—a tribal order, so to speak, with males predominating. It was of a religious and warlike nature, in which the sword predominated. Women had no part to play. Ruburt was the leader of such a group, and you were what could be considered his lieutenant, or closest at hand. The group was given to mystical practices, in which the dictums of Allah were followed—but also those dictums were enmeshed with some old Jewish practices and beliefs.

You have been hard on yourselves, for you were used to the instant recognition of your peers, and accepted none as your superiors. In this life you concentrated upon the search for knowledge—and even in that particular past life, power was important only because it was considered the gift to believers from God, and therefore the natural result of knowledge.

Very briefly: as a Roman, you pretended to be a follower while you were a man of rank in the military. You had no belief in the conventional gods, yet you were supposed to be conquering lands in their name. You traveled even to Africa. You had a disdain for leaders as liars, and of the masses as followers, and so you were always in one kind of dispute or another, with your fellows, and even with the authorities. You were of a querulous nature, yet highly curious, and again physically involved.

Only monks could afford it, and there were thousands of different groups scattered throughout Europe. There were equally as many long-forgotten communities, in which hermits of every sect imaginable squatted in caves in given areas. People of solitary nature born in medieval times had to make their own structures, and if they were not hermits or monks, they were outlaws of one kind or another, frequenting the woods, which were often full of semi-permanent but isolated communities—men and women who preyed upon travelers, for example.

He is obviously more restricted in that regard, but neither have you had a woman you had to escort, so your times were spent thinking, writing, exploring the nature of reality, and affecting society while not being infected by it, according to your concepts and beliefs. More than this, people come to you, as befits your Turkish condition. You do not go to them. Nor do you set up a school for fools—again, according to your beliefs and concepts.

Above all, neither of you wanted the condition to worsen. That is where you drew the line. No condition is stable, but ever-changing. The entire system of beliefs was based upon, again, fear of the spontaneous self on both of your parts—fear that it would lead you where you did not want to go, as if you and it were separate things, or as if its intents were by nature so divorced from your own that you must set up barriers against its expression except in certain acceptable areas.

To some extent or another you each feel that the world is insane. With his literal mind Ruburt took protection against it, and found in your apartment and home what he hoped would be a safe sanctuary in monastic terms, where each of you could learn and grow. On purposes you both agreed. Carried to extremes, however, the condition became alarming. This is why improvements are occurring, and because you each are beginning to realize that there is a natural world out there for the world of nature to which both the soul and the body relate. Your protections have been against the social world, but in the extremes you end up losing an important part of the natural world as well.

If you really do understand that you live in a safe universe, you need no such protection. If you emphasize your natural selves, and your relationship with the dusk and the dawn, and with the earth itself, you will feel free in that natural world.