“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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 at 10:06.) He squashed what intuitive abilities he had, and finally considered, for example, poetry unmanly. His place of work became his male domain. He wanted children to be frightened of him, for this proved that he was indeed superior, and not given to emotional outbursts.

His behavior, however, led him of course to quite powerful emotional outbursts, which frightened him. Ida married him because she believed his educational status, and his Anglo-Saxon background, meant a step upward for herself and her children. She did as she was told, for many years.

(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.

The artist’s standard of excellence is often the necessity of keeping his job, and he has to keep his job because he fears he is not after all a true artist, or he would be painting a great painting. And at work his art must be further distorted, it seems to him, by the ideas of salesmanship and advertising.