“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Before the session we talked about some questions we’d written down for the pendulum work tomorrow morning. They had to do with inspiration, Jane’s attitudes toward me as an authority figure, and so forth. This noon she’d made a very revealing remark, to the effect that her being out of condition was of service to me, also. I agreed, of course.

A talk about attitudes.

In the largest terms you cannot really call attitudes good or bad, though they certainly seem to be one or the other often in your experience. They can be better equated with colors—some dark, some light, but all in all beyond such classifications as morality.

Let us for the moment forget where or how each of you chose certain attitudes. If you did not have some trust in yourselves, some appreciation of your own characteristics, you would not have allowed yourselves to develop and use your abilities at all—or, for that matter, you would not have been able to form a vital long-term relationship with another person.

If you doubted yourselves and feared for the basic goodness of your beings, Ruburt far more than you, then this doubt was still relative and not absolute. By the time you met, however, certain attitudes were already paramount, regardless of your diverse backgrounds.

I am describing attitudes. Years ago, when it looked—generally speaking, now: I am simplifying—as if you might be swallowed by Artistic, you rebelled and became ill. You made certain readjustments, the sessions began, time went on. You were not selling paintings to any considerable degree. Ruburt knew he would not take a full-time job either. You may sometimes forget now how vehement your joint ideas were in those years, against the ordinary individual’s prospect of working eight hours a day, year after year, in the same place, doing the same thing. So Ruburt added the necessity of money to his creative goals, in a strong fashion.

Your other attitudes, mentioned earlier, continued, and the more the world seemed to knock at your door, however gently, and the more the mail came, the more convinced you both became that your solitude must be protected. The attitudes mentioned belong to some extent to each of you. That is why, for example, you went along as long as you have with Ruburt’s condition. Neither of you liked it. To that extent, Ruburt does speak for both of you (as Jane said this noon), and in your own way both of you rewarded him for creative material, and withheld approval for any tendencies that ran counter to those mentioned attitudes.

The same sort of situation operates in millions of families, and the rewards that you gave each other for your creative endeavors were excellent, and worked beautifully. They still do. There is nothing wrong with the other attitudes. You did, however, both for years believe most firmly that your creative endeavors were dependent upon the need for protection from others, the world, from time, and even from any of your own characteristics that did not seem to fit into that overall pattern.

You were each for some time relieved. These are patterns of attitudes of long standing, and at different times, as Ruburt improved, and new decisions came to mind, he backtracked, and you largely went along. With the continuation of the physical restraints other problems grew, and Ruburt would become frightened that his body could not indeed heal itself, and you feared the same. The past “failures” seemed indisputable evidence.

Your attitudes of course affect each other, so Ruburt looks to you for your reactions. He is somewhat afraid of mentioning any improvements, for fear either that you will not approve of them, or that you will, and then be disappointed on the following day. Your encouragement of his walking is excellent.

In all such cases, some reassurance on your part will greatly help, and often can cut such episodes short. The body beliefs need to be tackled regardless of the attitudes that gave them birth, and your reassurances of his attractiveness are important—for he convinced himself at least to some degree that because of his condition he was not attractive to others.