“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....”

(Yet, not long after Seth came through. Jane’s voice cleared easily, and she delivered his material easily and rapidly for the most part.)

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 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 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.

Dick finds pleasure in golf, because it represents an area in which he has hope of performing with some effectiveness, of acting with a spontaneity that knows its own order, and of experiencing his natural sense of power.

(A note: Yet Bill told me of his troubles with golf this season, lamenting how he has problems getting any distance in his drives, speaking of taking some lessons and practice in an effort to improve his game. We also discussed a major tournament that as it happened both of us had seen partially on TV last weekend.)

Ida and Dick both believe to a far greater extent, again, than you two ever did, that the self is unsavory and dangerous. Ida was afraid to see the psychologist again, for fear that therapy would throw up evidence of this feared evil thing, and Dick is afraid of writing poetry again lest the intuitions upset his life. He used meditation as a tranquilizer to dull his senses and mind, and not for understanding himself. Ruburt’s impulses gave birth to his poetry, to his writing, and to the freedom of his intellect and the heavy-handed discipline has always been impeding.

Dick, again, uses golf in order to actualize to some extent his feeling toward an ideal. He does not have that in his work any longer.

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.