“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.

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.

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?”

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.

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).