“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday afternoon we were visited by my brother Bill and his wife, Ida, from Ontario, NY. We all had a most enjoyable visit—I thought. We usually see them but once a year. But it developed that Jane had one of her most uncomfortable nights in years last night; she woke up often, very stiff, particularly in the dawn hours. She realized that she was reacting to what she’d taken to be all of the negative suggestions and circumstances surrounding Bill and Ida’s lives and beliefs. Later we wished we’d had the presence of mind to get up at dawn, say, when Jane’s more acute discomfort began.

(Just before the session began Jane started coughing quite a bit. Her voice became hoarse and dry. “It must be because of what I know Seth’s going to talk about,” she said between coughs. “Your brother and his family, and my reactions. I’ll try to have the session, but I don’t know how far I’ll get....”

Now: by the standards your brother Richard once believed in, and by the standards that your sister-in-law once believed in, they are both relatively successful.

They actually represent the ways in which beliefs can dull native qualities of mind and heart alike, so that the intellect seems opaque, and emotional relationships are unduly tangled. Ruburt is working with the nature of impulses, and old ideas about impulses, spontaneity and discipline rose to mind, for the family situation of your brother and his wife almost typifies the kind of situation that Ruburt was determined to avoid. And he thought, what was the entire affair, really, for it seemed to lack any kind of discipline. It seemed to him, with the force of old beliefs, that Ida, Richard and the children were indeed driven willy-nilly by contradictory impulses, and that their lives lack any organizing inner purpose.

They did what they believed was expected of them. For a time they rebelled, not in response to their own impulses, however, but in response to the demands of others. Your brother to some extent identified strongly with your father, seeing him as the intellectual, the inventor held in bonds, almost in thrall by the “emotional” demanding woman. He blamed your mother for all of their problems. In his own family he made sure that the male domain, the study, was separate from the family rooms, not to be shared. Books were not left around the house for women or children to misuse.

(Pause.) You have always been a hero, and yet a mystery to your brother Dick, a source of pride and yet of embarrassment. He considers studying dreams feminine, and to paint pictures of them presents a second mystery (intently). His own buried intuitional abilities, however, have always acted as a bridge between you, so that he feels a close affinity that he does not understand. He feels some affinity to Ruburt for the same reason, but Ruburt also upsets him, because he disapproves of women who think, and is very frightened because Ida in later years has started to criticize some of their joint beliefs.

(10:25.) I want to emphasize that your brother and sister-in-law have their own purposes, and I am not putting down their realities. I want you to realize also, however, that like many others, they have no handle on the world, so to speak, no perspective outside of their experience, from which they can view their lives, and I want you to appreciate those dimensions in your own reality.

Your covers represent the attempt to express an ideal in the context that exists in the publishing field. The difference between your idea of an excellent cover and the actuality, and the difference between your kind of experience and your brother’s, should help you become more aware even of the need for our joint work in the world.

I do not think you understand completely. I am not speaking of the fact that your brother has a family and children and you do not, and I am not forgetting you have problems. I am saying that the quality of your lives is far more satisfying in comparison to others’ than you realize, and that the kind of experience you have chosen offers the most productive challenges. You always have something to look forward to, clearer insight, the closest approximation to truth that you might attain, where many others live in a maze, in which it seems (pause) that any hope of effecting change is literally impossible, privately.