“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In one way or another many artists of whatever kind seek to physically express these innermost overtones. As Ruburt mentioned, years ago in Sayre he would find someplace in your apartment that seemed somehow secret for his workroom. He would then momentarily, for a while, withdraw from the workaday world. On other occasions he would write nighttimes, letting those hours by themselves create their own moods of secrecy and isolation from the social environment.

Ruburt had a reason for not going on tour, for example—one that was certainly acceptable enough in a world of conventional understanding. He was saved, so it seemed, from endless explanations; so with a kind of psychological economy that worked far too well for a time the symptoms served to keep him writing at his desk, to regulate the flow of psychic activity, making sure of its direction, and to provide a suitable social reason to refrain from activities that might distract him—from tours or shows, and also even from any onslaught of psychic activity that might follow any unseeming (underlined) spontaneous behavior.

(Long pause at 10:35. This turned into a one-minute pause.) The public arena (pause) is not so frightening. It is more factual to say that it goes against the grain as far as Ruburt is concerned. On top of that, however, you have the unconventional aspects of his own work that involves at least some controversy. (Long pause.) If Ruburt wrote other kinds of books—mysteries, for example, or straight novels—he would of course have no trouble explaining them in the public arena. But he would not find that arena anymore to his overall liking.

In that area of thinking, any one interview that is offered becomes a testing ground. The news broadcast (for ABC) for example: Suppose he did say yes, he has thought, and even managed to get by with it in his present condition—how many other such interviews might then be offered? With Sue’s book there have been other opportunities—people who wanted the story from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, and the talk from Prentice of a new campaign publicizing Ruburt’s work. Ruburt didn’t feel free to simply admit that he did not like the public arena. He felt he needed excuses, or in his own eyes and the eyes of others he would seem to be a coward.

Now this idealized self was primarily Ruburt’s—but to some extent also you contributed to it, feeling that anyone as gifted as Ruburt, if he were sure enough of himself, would indeed want to go out in that arena and press forward. You both felt a sense of schism between Ruburt’s physical condition and a hypothetical image of Ruburt as someone getting my material and ideally embodying it, so that if not perfect at least the main aspects of the life were smoothed out without contrasts. (Long pause.) In that regard indeed Ruburt felt as if he could not live up to my creative work—as if his physical being must embody all of the knowledge that came to him through our sessions—another important point.

(10:55.) Some of the members of your readership added to the pressure, of course (long pause). Behind all that you have earlier aspects of Ruburt’s life, involving habits of secrecy developed in childhood, the need for protection and so forth, that simply served to help build the framework. The young woman (Jane) found herself extremely uncomfortable to find your family members living together in one house—astounded by the thought of the family together in a trailer, frightened of the camp get-togethers. She could be expected to have some difficulties when presented with the thought that she should speak to gatherings of perhaps a thousand people or more, and that this was indeed her responsibility, all other feelings to the contrary.

If Ruburt had wanted to join the public arena, nothing would have kept him out. The feelings of resistance do not signify cowardice, but quite spontaneous objections to activities that largely go against his grain, and certainly when they are presented in such a black or white framework to begin with.