“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane slept late this morning, and after she had breakfast I read her last night’s session. We thought it excellent, of course. She now amazed me by saying that she now thought she understood that if she turned her focus away from her symptoms toward Prentice, say, or any other “outside” entity or situation, that she could improve physically by giving her body the freedom to do so. She sounded like things I’d said—and Seth too—many, many times; I’d thought she understood this. The notion is an important breakthrough for her, and one that must be accomplished if she is to improve physically.

(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.

Most people operate at one largely exclusive state of consciousness. Even most creative work is done at the recognized threshold of the normal waking consciousness. Ruburt was presented with—or presented himself with—a situation in which large portions of his creative life appeared in books that were written in another state of consciousness entirely. Little wonder, then, that he felt he must alert all natural and normal controls.

(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.

You are in the process of changing your definitions of yourselves as creatures, and each person is in one way or another involved. The idea of the Sinful Self has served as a large portion of that definition for centuries, bringing with it innumerable difficulties, of course. As Ruburt frees himself from that idea, as he must and can, the need for such unnecessary cautionary behavior will dissipate by itself.

Again, the issue is not some hypothetical one, but one that directly affects people’s most private actions. It must be swept aside, and recognized clearly as having no natural part to play, for it is an anti-natural concept, flying in the face of the good intent of each of nature’s individuals of whatever species.

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.

(“Can I ask just one question?)