“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

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.

I am not implying that he was so fated to behave. The prosaic reasons for the beliefs, however, do lie in his private background and to that extent in experiences humiliating for an adult to recall. Instead, Ruburt tells himself he should be above such feelings, or that they simply should no longer apply. They are not destined to apply, but there is a give-and-take between the future and the past. Understanding those issues can further help Ruburt give up the entire construct.

(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.