“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In your culture there are several built-in unfortunate circumstances in particular. The human personality is naturally a seeker of value fulfillment and creativity. It is not just, again, that man does not live by bread alone, but that his life is intimately bound up with his need for creative expression—his need to develop as an individual, and therefore to affect his world.

The various, numberless individual human abilities are part of your, say, gene pool as a species, so the drive to creatively use individual abilities is a spiritual and biological necessity. The Freudian, Darwinian dictates quite emphatically degrade man’s capacity for “greatness,” for heroic action in those terms, and greatly devalue the entire meaning connected with an individual self. Psychology’s emphasis upon the average norm, as mentioned previously, made people think that one individual should almost be a carbon of any other individual. Idiosyncrasies were frowned upon, and signs of creative ability were suspect in direct proportion to the strength of those abilities.

(9:18.) People were put in a position of trying to use very important creative drives, believing that those drives were, in fact, unnatural, highly suspect, tied in with madness or insanity—or at the very least, that those abilities would lead to antisocial behavior.

In that system of belief many creative people have felt that safeguards were necessary, for they had been taught to fear their own abilities. In that framework of belief, Ruburt felt justified in using physical symptoms as protection on both levels. They gave some protection even from inner spontaneity, so that the inner abilities would be regulated, and they protected him also from any derogatory behavior on the part of his fellow men in the world.

That insidious mistrust of creative abilities is alarmingly dangerous to the society, and frightening to the individual. The person is taught to mistrust the most the abilities he or she instinctively trusts the most. This is bound to lead to division. Creative people are not self-destructive, but if they sometimes appear so in the western world, it is because of that division, that artificial barrier.

That vision means that such a person is taught to mistrust the very abilities that could most help bring about creative solutions. When you leave that framework of belief, such self-protecting defensive mechanisms are no longer necessary. Ruburt is beginning to get that through his head.