“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Some of the reasons for such activities are sketched in our new book. But what you have is a learned pattern of face-saving self-deception and nefarious (with amusement) techniques, taught by parents to children; so often you pretend to want one thing, and you may say that you “will it” to happen—perhaps because what you really want is unacceptable, or so you have been taught: it is demeaning, or evil, or whatever. So in many cases people’s true motives “escape” them.

It is in its way perfectly all right to be frightened of the world. (Almost with a laugh:) Under certain conditions it may be a mark of sanity—but it is highly self-defeating to put yourself in a position where you cannot go out into the world—or more importantly, where you cannot navigate as a creature.

(10:03.) Ruburt thinks it is beneath him to be frightened of the world, so it is easier to pretend you cannot go out in it than to feel you are a coward—which in your society is the interpretation placed upon such feelings. If Ruburt does not want a public life, that is not cowardice. But as private people, and as creatures, you must value your freedom of motion, and your connections with the natural world of the seasons.

Ruburt does not need to feel that he would naturally, left alone, go out into the world, into the arena, and convince the world of our ideas, or think that with his energy unimpeded that would be part of his natural mission. That is not so. Nor would he be necessarily more fulfilled in that role, and it is that imagined, frightening role against which he pushes, and then retreats.

This means of course that deeply felt hope must be sardonically examined, that deeply buried faith must be stated with parried thrusts, and to that extent the paper speaks for a concentrated portion of your population so that our Jim Poett, who is a poet at heart, must appear in the slightly worn cloak of the skeptic. He must show that for all of his youth he is world-weary, not easily taken in, that he is objective—and only then can he allow his creative abilities to flow.

Now innovators are not conformists. Creative people do not fit into your society, so often they will indeed appear as the eccentrics, the disinherited, the mad, the obsessed, or whatever—because their desires and intents, their imaginations and their wills, are not satisfied by the tenets or organizations of the conventional world.

They are trying things that other people will not try—being creative in whatever area is open to them, so that often the creativity itself has a strained or even grotesque air. Some people who write you are like that. They are looking for a rational pattern large enough to contain and explain and focus their own misunderstood creativity.