“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.

(Jane also through the day received from Seth some material in answer to my remarks at breakfast this morning about the jacket colors chosen for Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality. The proof arrived in the mail while Dick and Ida were here; we looked at it without much reaction, but still thought about it on other levels a good deal. It lacks what I call good taste, as I’d feared it would, and is too cold and creepy. I for one have long reached the point where I expect little else from Prentice-Hall except shoddy work, and I think that by now Jane more or less agrees. She didn’t like the jacket colors.

(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....”

Along the way, they discovered those original standards were wanting (hoarsely). They did what they thought they were supposed to do, but do not feel nearly the sense of accomplishment or pleasure with their lives that they once expected. Ruburt is fond of both of them, as you are, but he saw them in their actuality, as themselves and as representative of many people in general.

The boy (David, who has quit school) had an automobile accident. What was that but impulsiveness, unthinking behavior? Ruburt had used all kinds of discipline, you see, lest he fall back into the common ground from which it seemed most people came from.

He is in a period where he is trying to release impulses, but one look at that situation—momentarily, now—panicked him, so that he began to wonder if any discipline was not worthwhile to prevent what he considered that kind of intuitional and intellectual sloth.

He is loyal to your family. He tries to help them, and he tried to deal with his own responses. He tried to rouse William’s intellect and intuitions, but to his utter amazement he found both more dormant than he had expected. Let me clear the issues. Generally speaking now, Dick and Ida seldom followed their own impulses; no matter for example how impulsive Dick might have seemed at times in the past. Both of them distrusted the self to a far greater degree than either of you ever did, so that the fine grains of originality were dulled in all areas of their lives.

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.

But Ruburt thought: “This is what most people are like, and if I give in to my impulses, will the days slide by me like that?”

He felt partially helpless, realizing that neither Dick nor Ida read the books. He wanted to improve physically before their eyes, in a flash of a moment, to show them physically that it could be done. All of this caused muscular tensions, but he was appalled at what he considered Dick and Ida’s laxness in so many areas, and it seemed that that was the natural human condition, so that you must exert great discipline to keep yourself aloft from it. It is not the natural condition of the species to begin with, and naturally (underlined) neither of you were that way. The truer you are to yourselves, and to your natural impulses, the less you will be that way (intently again).

I forget. That was to me implied, but it was not stated here.

The people at Prentice and generally speaking at any publishing house, live more or less at the level you saw yesterday. Each person senses an ideal, and has good intent, but those ideals and good intents are distorted by beliefs, and by the conditions accompanying them.

There are people who work in art departments as a living, gifted certainly more than most with an ability to visually portray an idea. They sense an ideal, but those ideals and abilities are everywhere distorted by millions of other considerations. What do they think of their art themselves? To what purpose do they use it? What does their wife or husband think? What does the boss think? Whose version is the final one for a cover? What does the artist think of the subject matter? What are the artist’s standards of excellence?

Your way is difficult, but it has unusual rewards. Those who have followed old beliefs do not have it easy either, and they do not know where to turn. Count your blessings.