“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause, one of many, at 9:36.) Ruburt’s background formed its own relative uniqueness—the household was charged. Give us a moment.... Ruburt picked that background because it afforded certain opportunities. Those opportunities involved emotional understanding, a very close and emotional contact with a particular belief system, and a firsthand view of a certain kind of reality structure.

(Long pause.) In that background Ruburt saw firsthand an example of many of the most unfortunate issues with which we have been presently concerned, to at least some extent, as he followed his mother’s adventures through the medical system, for example, through the welfare process. Marie was also a woman living without a man for many years. She was a strong personality. She lived in a relatively tumultuous emotional climate, provided with one kind of emotional excitement or another all the while.

(Long pause at 9:17.) The emotional situation did not lean in that direction: they had parted too many years before. It was as if Marie were saying, “This is the kind of a life those beliefs can create. Now you go out and see what you can do to change it.” Those events also added high drama, rich content, and provided unique creative material. Even in that background and with Marie’s behavior, Ruburt received a grounding in poetry, you see. His mother tried her writing. It would never have occurred to your mother to try short stories.

The priests introduced “good” music, poetry, and a high educational background, even if it was a limited distorted framework. Father Traynor provided some kindliness, compassion and good will as he tried to translate Catholic dogma to Ruburt’s rebellious mind. He tried to restrain Marie in her expressions of bitterness.

Marie also found peripheral relationships throughout later life, with nurses or attendants who turned into friends—and while her life certainly was not a happy one, it was not as tragic as it now seems to Ruburt to have been, so that the beneficial elements of that early background were used without quarreling, of course. The unbeneficial elements were also used, many with quite creative results.

(Long pause at 9:32.) Worse, its questions were largely ignored, so that its panic grew. Another portion of the self seemed to be initiating an entirely different system of reality, in complete opposition to that early background, and the Sinful Self was bound to react with some alarm. It is already beginning to change its views. It wanted the communication to begin with. In the meantime Ruburt felt—because of those beliefs—to some extent now, I am simplifying —that he could not do enough, produce enough, help himself or others enough, that he could not satisfy you enough in many areas, because he felt he was so flawed to begin with, therefore he did not deserve love, and would have to work for it, or plead for it.