“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.

Science has no sacraments. Its only methods of dealing with such guilt involve standard psychoanalytic counseling—which itself deepens the dilemma, for counseling itself is based upon the idea that the inner self is a reservoir of savage impulses. Period.

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.

(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.

(Long pause at 9:48.) As he became better known, so it seemed greater demands were put upon him. Another image of the self comes into consideration, so that it seems to him that he is expected to be nearly a saintly self—or at least that he is regarded as someone who is expected to perform in an altogether superlative fashion. Almost a superself: Again, an excellent television personality, an accomplished healer and clairvoyant, and writer and teacher to boot.

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.

(10:08.) The psychic abilities and the creative abilities—nearly impossible to separate—themselves provide all of the help that he requires, but the concept of the Sinful Self prevented him from using those abilities sufficiently—for how can the expressions of the Sinful Self be trusted?

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.

(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.

(I added that I’d had no idea that the idea of the Sinful Self occupied that prominent and basic a position in her life. It was beginning to look as if the Sinful Self concept occupied the central position in her beliefs. It would make a lot of sense, I said, if it were true, and would account for things like an obsession with work, giving up other life activities, etc.—all done in a disguised attempt to appease that Sinful Self that merrily carried on year after year.... “But in a funny way that may be okay,” I mused, “because if that’s it, we now know where we can grab hold of the Sinful Self, once we know what we’re doing, not groping around in a morass of suppositions and speculations.”)