“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“I very vaguely feel him around,” Jane said at 9:30, after we’d been sitting for the session since 9:10. I’d been busy with these notes while waiting. Earlier, she’d finished a small acrylic still life of flowers and fruit.)

(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.) 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.

Again, that belief in the need for control is rooted in the earlier concepts of the Sinful Self (long pause)—concepts that have come to the fore in current contemporary world events with the new attention being given to religious cults and religions. Current events can trigger such reactions, therefore. Ruburt has told himself that such feelings were beneath him, but often the feelings themselves went underground. Those feelings were nearly incomprehensible to you, so that it was difficult for you to see how they could even be taken seriously.

Since Ruburt’s work involved him most directly in an examination of the self and in the unknown reaches of the psyche, then his experiences led him into a conflict with the idea of the Sinful Self. One of the main points of his work, and mine, is the definition of the well-intentioned self, of course. Ruburt was to some extent afraid to accept that concept fully—therefore he has been unable to utilize it fully in his mistaken belief that he must maintain a largely critical stance.

The material I gave this evening should help him see the reason for the problems behind the symptoms. (Pause.) It is humiliating to realize that you consider yourself as a Sinful Self, potentially evil, and to encounter the feelings themselves (intently)—so Ruburt has shoved them underground.

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.

(Again I was surprised, and groped for words as Seth sat quietly waiting. “Wait a minute.... Are you actually saying that he feels that his mother and father both thought of him as evil—that now he thinks he’s that evil?”)

He thought that he was such a bad person that he drove his parents apart, perhaps caused his mother’s illness, perhaps his grandmother’s death—for which his mother did indeed several times blame him—and that the classical idea of the Sinful Self was individually interpreted in that manner in Ruburt’s personal early life.

His mother told him he ruined everyone he touched. Those experiences were relatively unfortunate enough, but they were a part of the early life of someone who later finds themselves embarked upon in the study of the very nature of the self, so that they led him to believe that strong cautionary methods must be used. Period.