“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(A copy of this session is also being placed in the deleted notebook, since I’d like it to be placed under both categories.) I think it contains some excellent general material that, I told Jane, I was afreaid wouldn’t be seen by anyone if it were filed exclusively under private material.

(Actually, this evening’s session grew out of several insights Jane had given voice to in recent days, and osme relaxation effects that had followed several of those. “But right now I’m just waiting,” she said impatiently at 9:40 PM, after we’d been sitting since 9:25 or so. “It makes me so mad. Here I was all set to go earlier.” Then she amended: “It makes me mad because I feel like I’m in an odd in-between subjective state. It isn’t comfortable—I want to be one thing or the other, maybe....”

(10:03.) The Catholic Church taught that revelation was dangerous. Intellectual and psychic obedience was much the safer road, and even the saints were slightly suspect. Women were inferiors, and in matters of religion and philosophy most of all, for there their creativity could be most disruptive. Women were considered hysterics, aliens to the world of intellectual thought, swayed instead by incomprehensible womanish emotions. She was to be handled by wearing down her energy through continual childbirth.

Ruburt was highly creative, and so following the beliefs of his time, he believed that he must watch his creativity most carefully, for he was determined to use it. He decided early to have no children—but more, to fight any evidence of femininity that might taint his work, or jumble up his dedication to it. He loved you deeply, and does, but he always felt he had to tread a slender line, so as to satisfy the various needs and beliefs that you both had to one extent or another, and those you felt society possessed.

He was creative, and is. Yet he felt that women were inferior, and that his very abilities made him vulnerable, that he would be ridiculed by others, that women were not taken seriously as profound thinkers, or innovators in philosophical matters.

The trance itself had feminine connotations. Though he conveniently forgot [Edgar] Cayce, for example, who was a trance master. And yet at the same time he was afraid of exerting power, for fear it would be thought that he was usurping male prerogatives.

Now: you are creative, but you are a male—and one part of you considered creativity a feminine-like characteristic. If it were tied to money-making, as it once was, then painting became also power-making, and hence acceptable to your American malehood; and I am quite aware of the fact that both of you were, by the standards of your times, quite liberal, more the pity. You would not take your art to the marketplace after you left commercial work, because then, in a manner of speaking now, understand, you considered that the act of a prostitute, for your “feminine feelings” that you felt produced the painting would then be sold for the sake of “the male’s role as provider and bringer of power.”

Indeed, these are some of the reasons why Ruburt distrusted the spontaneous self—because it was feminine, he believed, and therefore more flawed than the spontaneous self of the male.

(Pause.) This is difficult to verbalize. (Pause.) It was a state when the species became aware of its own thoughts as its own thoughts, and became conscious of the self who thinks. That point released man’s creativity. In your terms, it was the product of the feminine intuitions (though, as you know, such intuitions belong to both sexes). When the passages were written, the species had come to various states of order, achieving certain powers and organizations, and it wanted to maintain the status quo. No more intuitive visions, no more changes, were wanted. Creativity was to follow certain definite roads, so the woman became the villain.

I have given material on that before. To some extent, then, Ruburt became afraid of his own creativity, and so did you. In Ruburt’s case the fear was greater, until it seemed sometimes that if he succeeded in his work he would succeed at some peril: you might be put in an unpleasant light, or he might become a fanatic, displaying those despicable, feminine hysterical qualities. (With much humor:) I hope this session benefits you both. End of session, and a fond good evening.

(10:35 PM. Jane’s trances and delivery had been good. “I didn’t know he was going to do that,” she said after I told her it was an excellent session. “Maybe that’s why I felt so uncomfortable before the session. Now I feel exhausted. I could go right to bed, but I won’t....”