“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt found great comfort in the church as a young person, for if it created within its members the image of a Sinful Self, it also of course provided a steady system of treatment—a series of rituals that gave the individual some sense of hope the Sinful Self could be redeemed, as in most of Christianity’s framework through adherence to certain segments of Christian dogma.

(Long pause at 9:20.) Ruburt’s creative nature early began to perceive at least that man’s existence contained other realities that were deeper. (Long pause.) Some of this is difficult to separate. To leave the church, say, meant to carry still some of the old beliefs, but without the Band-Aids that earlier offered some protection.

He began to search actually from childhood in a natural fashion toward some larger framework that would offer an explanation for reality that bore at least some resemblance to the natural vision of his best poetry. I have said before that many creative people, highly gifted, have died young in one way or the other because their great gifts of creativity could find no clear room in which to grow. They became strangled by the beliefs of the cultural times.

In that regard, Ruburt’s creativity kept struggling for its own growth and value fulfillment. His psychic recognition or initiation represented a remarkable breakthrough, meant to give him that additional psychic room that would insure the continued expansion of the abilities of the natural self. The Sinful Self concept is a personal one for each who holds it, but it is also projected outward onto the entire species, of course, until the whole world seems tainted.

At the time the sessions began (pause), the world was beginning to seem senseless, truly incomprehensible, to anyone who held any sense of poetry or sanity. Your private lives were showing their own difficulties, and the national situation was horrendous. Ruburt’s creativity broke through those frameworks to provide our sessions and to release the psychic abilities that had earlier been nearly but not completely repressed.

(9:37.) The sessions then opened the door to a particular kind of value fulfillment that was natural to Ruburt’s being. Now to some extent it was that poor, unhappy Sinful Self, a psychological structure formed by beliefs and feelings, that was also seeking its own redemption, since even it had outgrown the framework that so defined it.

With his mother dead it seemed highly unsporting to cast, for example, any aspersions or express fresh anger against injustice. In the meantime, his own understanding was growing, and his creative capacities. In my book we rather elegantly pinpointed those precise problems that have so tainted your world, and in God of Jane Ruburt made an excellent attempt to uncover the nature of the Sinful Self, and to outline the dilemma.

(10:17.) Ruburt was not responsible for his mother’s reality, for her characteristics, reactions, or beliefs. He was not responsible for her marriage, its breakup, for his mother’s illness, again, or for the entire “tragedy” that he sees as his mother’s life.

(Long pause.) He acted toward her according to his own understanding the best that he could. He does not need to punish himself in any way for any actions or any omissions in that relationship. This does not mean he could not have acted better in any particular instance, perhaps, for that can be said about almost anyone.

(A one-minute pause at 10:22.) Ruburt chose his environment. Ruburt chose his parents for his own lifetime: he was born in the right place at the right time. Now in that larger light, even the concept of the Sinful Self has its reasoning, for it is once again shared by millions of people for centuries. Ruburt set out to shoot it down.

The mass reality is ready for such a change. (Long pause.) In the past the Sinful-Self idea was so a part of Ruburt’s conditioning that it set up an entire framework of behavior. The need to justify life through writing, the exaggerated need for protection from the deceptive unconscious and the unsafe world, and the concept itself were so involved with his entire thinking patterns that he could not isolate it to see where and how it bore upon his activities. Now we can separate those strands.

(Long pause.) Those beliefs to some extent or another appear without their strong religious connotations in your own life and background also, and this will also be discussed in the series. The idea of Ruburt’s book (on rationalism) is a good one because it represents creative impetus—undertaken, however, in the light of newer understanding, and I will have more to say concerning that issue.

(10:33 PM. Jane had done very well. She remembered Seth mentioning her book idea—on rationalism—although she didn’t have “any great feelings yet” about it—how to do it or start it. I was surprised that she was interested in a study of rationalism, since her own abilities would seriously question many of rationalism’s tenets, at least in ordinary terms.