“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After supper today Jane said that for the first time in some little while she went to the john without a feeling of panic. She did a little better. I’m just finishing typing last Monday’s session, the first in our new series, but already I think the program has helped her.

(She’s been sleeping in the mornings because I haven’t called her at 6:15 when I get up, but starting tomorrow she plans to get up with me so we have enough time through the day to do more things. Jane still hasn’t been going to the john more than three times a day, nor have we yet tried point 4 on my list: taking one step a day with the aid of the typing table. She slept well last night. I also feel better following my exhaustion of yesterday. Frank Longwell visited this noon.

(I was so absorbed typing that Jane had to call me three times for the session. Finally I heard her at 8:50. Once again we sat waiting, she on the couch as before. I mentioned what Seth had said about her father in the last session, and asked her if she thought material on her mother might help. To my surprise Jane agreed. But I didn’t want such material to interrupt whatever Seth might be planning for tonight.)

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.

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.

(Long pause.) Ruburt broke through both psychically and creatively—that is, the sessions almost immediately provided him with new creative inspiration and expression and with the expansions needed psychologically that would help fulfill his promise as a writer and as a mature personality. He was still left, however, with the beliefs in the Sinful Self, and carried within him many deep fears that told him that self-expression itself and spontaneity were highly dangerous.

It is one thing to say that the dilemma is unfortunate, but it is also true to say that the dilemma existed because of a breakthrough that gave him what amounted to a new life at the time....

In the light of this discussion, now, that self was as unrealistic at its end of the spectrum as the Sinful Self was at the other, for Ruburt felt that he was supposed to demonstrate a certain kind of superhuman feat, not only managing on occasion to uncover glimpses of man’s greater abilities, but to demonstrate these competently at the drop of a hat, willingly at the request of others. At the same time he believed he was the Sinful Self, and that expression was highly dangerous—so between those two frameworks, the psychological organization, he operated as best he could, still seeking toward the natural value fulfillment that was his natural heritage.

The creative abilities, again, can help provide the necessary psychological motion and direction—they have in a large regard in the past, but they have not gone far enough. They have not gone far enough because Ruburt did not come to terms with his private version of the Sinful Self, and therefore still kept himself open to all of the negative conditioning that is so involved there: a conditioning that views all creative expression with distrust.

(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.

That concept will be changed because many people in your society and in your times were indeed born with the same intent, and in their private and public lives they are tackling that issue.

(“What do you think about the idea of one step at a time with the typing table each day?”)

(But I stressed that no matter what she did about books, no matter what hassles we might get involved in about that activity, she just couldn’t give up physical mobility in order to express any lack of psychological mobility that we might become involved in. It was too high a price to pay, too unnecessary. “You just can’t,” I said, “no matter what happens, professionally....” She agreed.