“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(It had been snowing very finely ever since suppertime. Now as Jane paused in her delivery I heard the town sander moving powerfully up Holley Road past our kitchen windows. Its rotating red light flashed briefly into our living room.)