“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Continuation, apropos of Ruburt and the Sinful Self.

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.

When Ruburt left the Church, the concept of the Sinful Self was still there, but the methods that earlier served to relieve its pressures were no longer effectively present. The concept was shifted over to the flawed self of scientific vintage.

(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.

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.

His poetry acted in some regards as a stimulator. That breakthrough, you might say, with perhaps some exaggeration, was a life saver, for without some such expansion Ruburt would have felt unable to continue the particular brand of his existence. It is not possible to say in words what one person or another looks for in life, or what unique features best promote his or her growth and development. Even two plants of the same kind sometimes require completely different treatments.

(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.

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.

(Long pause.) The superself image itself seemed to condemn him, of course, since he felt he could not live up to it—and therefore along the line somewhere both the superself and the Sinful Self became in their ways joined, or at least allied. Through all of that Ruburt of course looked for further creative developments and intuitive breakthroughs, for, again, he needed more room.

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.

Now those books were the result of value fulfillment and creativity. They were necessary projections of understanding and growth. They were also bound to bring the entire concept into light, to bring the problem to the surface. Ruburt therefore encountered newer bouts of symptoms that effectively demonstrated and mirrored the feeling of lack of mobility. Again, he needed room to grow.

So we must now show Ruburt the source of the Sinful Self to begin with, and convince him that such is not his natural self at all and to do so we will to some extent at least go into his early background. The main thrust, however, will be the need for expression and value fulfillment that to one extent or another has always been impeded by the beliefs inherent in the entire Sinful-Self concept.

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.

(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.

(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.