“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I kept trying to verbalize a thought that had come to me after supper tonight, but couldn’t get it out. “It’s got to do with understanding that one must protect or encourage personal integrity before anything else,” I said, “even if it means projecting one’s troubles out onto an entity like Prentice, the church, or whatever. Even though we can’t blame those entities, really, for doing much that we hadn’t allowed them to do....” But I knew I was trying to get at deeper approximations of some sort of truth, and so did Jane. As Seth says, we each do create our own reality.

For Ruburt: you do not lead people anywhere. You cannot force them to change their beliefs. (Long pause.) No most hypnotic fanatic leads any group of people astray. You make your own reality. The people use the materials of the world as they come into contact with them, in their own ways and for their own reasons. To imagine that you or anyone else can lead large masses of persons astray is a highly erroneous conception.

If you believe that your own great energy can lead others astray, you are actually saying that others have no power of their own. Ruburt has been extremely cautious in the past, wanting to make sure, as mentioned, that he was not leading others down the proverbial garden path. He did not feel the same way about his poetry, which largely in its way states the same messages that our own books do.

(Long pause at 9:54.) Ideas of using considerable caution have been with him for that matter before the sessions began, when he recognized his own energy, the ease with which he could encounter people. As for example when he acted as a salesperson years ago, sometimes gathering small groups at the street corners in Florida. He learned to fear his own energy to some extent—or rather, he believed that he must be very cautious in its use. Those habits were there, again, before the sessions began, and they have their basis in the church’s concepts of the sinful nature of the basic self.

(Long pause.) In that regard his symptoms developed more along the lines of exerting caution rather than, say, seeking protection. (Long pause.)It is as if someone on his own developed a spectacular amazing fast craft, and built a secondary system—a backup system—that allowed for great braking power in case this was necessary to offset the craft’s own speed.

(Long pause.) He felt it his duty to examine his psychic material with supercritical force, since it seemed to come from the other side of consciousness, so to speak, and since it presented such a different picture of all aspects of reality. (Pause.) His symptoms served other purposes as well, though, as has been given often. In a fashion they served as regulators that he felt at one time allowed him to live on an even course, tempering spontaneity or psychic exploration lest it progress too quickly for him to follow, yet also protecting him from other distractions so that he could continue his explorations.

(10:12.) In other words, he felt he needed a countering force for his own spontaneity. He received some ideas of that nature from you in the past. In a way the symptoms were almost a method of presentation that in another fashion completely paralleled your own notes (an excellent point). In that regard they were meant to show that he was as reasonable, orderly, critical and responsible as your notes certainly showed you to be. The symptoms have fluctuated, serving sometimes one purpose more than the other—but what you have overall is a belief in a kind of braking power with which to handle spontaneous activity.

It is no coincidence that you have been relatively free of that concept in its traditional religious connotation. You worked that out in your Nebene existence to a large extent, and because of your own preparations for a life in which you are now involved.

In personal terms, he feared that his father abandoned him for that reason, that his mother disliked him for that reason, for each person will interpret the belief in his or her own life according to circumstances.

(10:58 PM. I was glad I’d asked the second question in particular—at first I’d found it hard to believe that Jane thought of herself as evil for any reason, parents or whatever. Not that we hadn’t known from earlier material and our own conscious experiences that her mother especially had often exerted an unhealthy pressure upon the daughter—but I’d been taken back to realize that Seth was actually saying that Jane had considered herself evil.