“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(As we sat waiting I read to Jane pages 4 and 5 of the private session for October 22, 1973—excellent material concerning the contrasts displayed by Jane’s parents. Seth had discussed her father’s laxness, and her mother’s drive toward purpose, power, and control, and how Jane had felt that she must make a choice between the two modes of behavior. Not realizing that she could choose her own independent course. The session and others dating from that time offers very good insights into Jane’s choice of actions over the years. “Well, I guess he’s gotten turned on by what you just read,” she said now—for now she felt that Seth was ready to come through. She’d been waiting impatiently for some time for you-know-who to put in an appearance.)

Ruburt should read that session (for October 22, 1973) and ones immediately previous. The attitudes still stand to some important degree. The contrast represented his own interpretation of his private reality, of course—yet they also represent the main issues involved right now in your society at large.

The same issues underlie your own attitudes, the tension between effort and relaxation, discipline and spontaneity has applied, say, in the creative area as far as painting is concerned. Ruburt set out, of course, to handle his own purposes and challenges, but he chose those in the context of your world, so that in encountering them personally he would encounter them for your society as well. In such ways, the species does handle psychological and psychic issues.

(10:00.) When you make love you are entrusting yourself to someone else, making a spiritual and biological statement of openness that is understood through all the levels of your experience—even to the cellular. Under such loving conditions healing energies are spontaneously released. In its own fashion such acts of love are beneficially related with the spontaneous behavior of animals. That is, you can behave to some extent at such times with a creature-like sense of trust and spontaneity, and of loving openness of a kind that animals at their best often display. Again, I mentioned that you could both benefit far more from more such encounters. They generate trust.

Your morning discussion, concerning Ruburt’s past, was also beneficial, for it is good to remind yourselves of your own (underlined) backgrounds, rather than ever comparing yourselves with other people whose own backgrounds may have little to do with yours. You have both done remarkably well from that viewpoint. When you seem to suffer in contrast to the development or situation of any other specific or generalized persons, it is when you are trying to live up to artificial pictures of yourselves—of people who should have been as knowledgeable years ago as they are now, and who therefore now should be at much greater stages of development.

(Long pause.) Love-making reunites you with your own pasts, and unconscious bodily memory carries you backward to your earliest responses to your own body and that of others. To some extent then the child with all of his wonder about his own body is aroused in each act of love-making, whatever its variety. With those memories come feelings of biological exuberance, the body’s faith in itself, all highly important, and far more therapeutic than is ever realized in your society.

(10:20.) Again, it goes without saying that in your situations you largely overlook such benefits. Ruburt’s remarks in his essay on love apply here, in regard to its specific nature. That is (pause), it arouses memories from your own most intimate moments in the past, and therefore in its own way records the development of ideas and attitudes that you might otherwise completely overlook. You had friends lately disappointed in marriages and relationships (Sue and Claire). Your own relationship is itself quite extraordinary, precisely in the light of your own backgrounds—not as you think those backgrounds should have been, but as they were.

When you ask why you did not understand when you were young what you know now, you are ignoring the validity of your own past to some extent, and denying the accomplishments that have resulted—because it seems that you should now be much further on, so that you create a kind of artificial self who began where you are now, and with whom it seems you can never catch up.

At Ruburt’s end, it almost seems as if he had our material at hand magically without effort, and therefore should have put it to use at once, learning the lessons of half a lifetime in a few years, and graduating to solve all of his own problems and half of the world’s as well. Against that image of course he feels inadequate, and of course such an image would make him lose faith in himself to some degree; so it is very important that you realize how well you have both done in many areas of activity, and that you reinforce each other in those directions.