“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You are both quite in the habit of asking what is wrong—not only in terms of Ruburt’s difficulties, but generally speaking. It is difficult to explain what I want to because of your own beliefs and significances that you sometimes form. The young man (see the 816th session proper) was really comparing his life and the earth unfavorably with an idealized imagined world, to which he could never return. Just about everything in his experience seemed wrong, and his experience seemed thrust upon him—an exaggerated case, of course.

Yet in a way you each do the same thing, taking it for granted as a fact of existence that there is something wrong with each of you. You should have produced much more and much better art than you have. This seems to be a fact, so that you find yourself blaming yourself at times. There is definitely something wrong with Ruburt. Otherwise he would be walking properly. Ruburt would be walking properly if he did not believe there was something wrong with him.

Much of your mental experience daily is based upon the proposition that there is something wrong with each of you, for one reason or another. Again, it is difficult to say what I want to while still trying to avoid contradictions at your end—and yet it seldom occurs to you that you might just possibly be doing exactly what you were meant to do, or that you are in exactly the right place and time and circumstances.

(10:32.) Your young man, your visitor, does indeed suffer torments because he is so thoroughly convinced he is in the wrong place at the wrong time, and all of his unfortunate experiences follow that conviction, which so far he has refused to give up. Incidentally, you both handled that affair very well. You avoided the kind of direct confrontation that would have resulted had you said, for example “I do not believe your spirit,” or “I do not believe he could do thus and so.” Your whole attitude showed the young man, however, that he was the one who must examine his own beliefs, and without immediately panicking him you showed by inference your own belief that his delusion was doing him considerable harm.

When you hold such a conviction you are always convinced that something is wrong, and your belief brings about a condition which gives you justification for feeling that. Ruburt can say “Of course there is something wrong with me. Look at my condition.” But the condition began when he began to believe that he should be different than he is.

Your own chest feelings emerge when you feel you should be different than you are. We are not speaking of perfection, yet you are each perfectly yourselves. The feeling that there is something wrong then begins to become a strong significance in your lives. Without check, it begins to gain its own momentum, so that you become less and less aware of what is right, and more and more begin to focus looking for proof of your conviction.

Almost in every instance, when you are upset in any way, this is a reflection of your feeling that you should be different than you are—your conviction that you have gone wrong in an important area. That conviction closes off your understanding, so that your own rightness is not apparent, so that a vital dimension is lost, practically speaking.

Often actions that are quite right for you then appear wrong, in the light of your misconceptions. I want you to keep all of this in mind, beginning the new year perhaps on better footing.

Give us a moment.... The same applies to Ruburt’s condition, of course, for he constantly concentrates on what is still wrong. But the material that I have just given should hopefully show him that he has been putting the cart before the horse.