“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.

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.

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.

(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.

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?

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.