“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now. (Long pause.) You are to some degree a sports-minded culture. Sports are regarded as an enviable field of endeavor. Sportslike abilities are encouraged from early childhood, particularly as far as the males are concerned.

Sportsmen and athletes are admired and well-rewarded. As you know, the running records have been broken in late years time and time again. The crowds acclaim the sense of competition, the excitement, the rewards, and the belief in performance have all been responsible for the breaking of previous records. On the other hand, psychic abilities have generally (underlined) been held in such poor reputation for centuries (with gestures), so discouraged, that you might think it quite a wonder that they still show themselves.

Persons displaying such abilities have had to be strong personalities in order to hold up under a barrage of varying disreputable distortions thrown upon them by science, or religion, and particularly in the past, even by governments.

No mainline Western culture for centuries has granted the validity of psychic abilities. Yet those abilities arise in each generation, misinterpreted or no. They cannot disappear, because they are an important part of man’s heritage. They are invisible contributors to his knowledge. They are natural methods of perception that cannot be legislated away by governments, cannot be ripped out of people’s make-ups by religions or by sciences.

Let us look—once again—back into the past. Your own psychic abilities, and Ruburt’s, saved you (as I remarked after supper) at the time of your physical difficulties. I must insist once more that you take probabilities into consideration.

The psychic abilities are (underlined) the creative abilities—natural extensions of what you think of as the creative abilities. They do not just help you paint a picture, or write a poem, but they help you form the living picture of your lives. In a way (underlined), you were too contemplative (pause), even perhaps too intellectually inclined, perhaps even too solitary, to be an artist alone.

You saw in your parents the first signs of illness and age as you thought of those things. You were into your 40’s, and felt your own abilities still somehow unchallenged, not fully used. You fell ill. (Pause.) The two of you from your first meeting actually responded largely to portions of yourselves unmanifest then—to portions of yourselves that you are only now becoming. You sensed the shape of the probability that is now your life, that is now your life together (intently). And from that probable future in your past, your creative abilities were accelerated.

You were well aware, intuitively, of Ruburt’s strong abilities, though you had no labels for them. Ruburt was appalled at your situation, and moreover your moodiness at the time led him to fear that you might turn away from him. He sensed your abilities also, and psychically the two of you pooled your creative resources to reach beyond the reality that you know, to search for some other vaster framework that could help explain the events of your private reality and the events of the public world. For that world did indeed seem chaotic, particularly with your president’s assassination and the situation in Cuba.

Creative people were unfortunately particularly affected, because their very abilities require an exuberance, an energy, that can only be quelled by a sense of meaninglessness. (Pause.) Neither of you were taught to trust creative abilities, much less psychic ones. (Pause.)In a fashion (underlined), Ruburt thought of his abilities as fascinating but untrustworthy allies: give them an inch and they will take a yard.

Left alone, he never wrote conventional fiction. His abilities would not confine themselves to such a limited form, and he was always trying to bring them into line. He grew up at a time when it was considered somewhat dangerous to be different from others. In the home, the Catholic asylum, he was often punished for noncomformity. He tried to form a protective self to keep himself in line.

(Long pause.) His basic nature, again, has always insisted upon expressing its high exuberance, its natural abilities. He had problems to face, then, that resulted in his symptoms—but (louder) they are nothing like the problems he would have had to face had he not found this greater framework for himself and others.

There is a power of value fulfillment and growth within each individual that must be satisfied. It is the power that makes physical growth possible, the power that is behind the fetus. You know ahead of time the nature of the period into which you will be born. (Pause.) You were both born with certain abilities, and you knew ahead of time that you would have to enlarge the framework of conventional concepts if you were to have room to use those abilities. In a way, they gave you both a second life, for in the old framework there was no satisfying (underlined) or creative way to go.