“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.)

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.

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.

In the meantime, since he was older, and in the light of our sessions, it seemed to him that he must have outgrown many of the beliefs of early childhood, and that he must have enough perspective so that those earlier feelings and fears no longer applied. They were highly unpleasant.

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.

(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.

(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.

(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.

(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.”)