“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.

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.

The books are different, however, while the poetry carries the more clearly recognizable stamp of his accepted identity, so he was afraid that I would lead people astray unwittingly perhaps, through the energy and power of our communications. That worry persisted, regardless of what kind of status he assigned to me. The relationship, of course, is unusual: very few people have such issues to contend with. Ruburt discovered how basically easy it was to have our sessions. But also how basically easy it was for his, say, Cézanne and James books also, for creatively he moved very quickly.

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.

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.

(10:22.) It was in Mass Events and God of Jane that the usual concept of the Sinful Self was most directly and vigorously addressed, and in which the value of individual impulses was stressed with consistent vigor. Ruburt has been dealing with that material since then. (Pause.) Many people in your society and others are dealing precisely with the same issues, though in different contexts.

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.

If you consider the self as good, you feel free to express it and its abilities. Some of Ruburt’s ideas along those lines were highly reinforced by his mother as well as by the church, and later in its way by the very pronouncements of science.

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.

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.

If Ruburt had been involved in other endeavors requiring unusual amounts of expression and creativity, however, the same cautionary methods would also have been activated to varying degrees.

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.