“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause at 10:08.) So true art must in a vital fashion be divorced from utility, or from its function outside of itself, or you will end up with something else entirely. Left alone, Ruburt’s creative life falls into inspirational patterns that spring from their own secretive sources. If the “products” help people, that help is an additional feature flowing naturally from the art itself, and not applied to it with a heavy hand.

(Pause.) Ruburt has felt too responsible to develop his psychic abilities, to produce another “psychically inspired” work of his own. The sense of responsibility of that kind stifles love, which must be free to form its own creativity in its own fashion. Therefore, left alone, Ruburt writes freely, and in an inspired nature because that is (underlined) his nature. It is what he loves to do. When he becomes overly concerned with ideas of responsibility to use his talent, then the love beneath them is smothered to some extent and denied its flow.

(Pause.) This led certainly to conflict. The idea of the public image coming through the correspondence, and as it was interpreted by Ruburt, further deepened the feeling of responsibility. Certainly “a great psychic teacher” had a responsibility of some weight (ironically humorous), and therefore it seemed imperative to Ruburt that he not make errors, that he live up to the characteristics generally ascribed to such an image. Thus, some experimentation was cut out (such as?). He began to think that anything less than this public personality was cowardly.

It seemed that this would be thrust upon him, however—that it was expected, and that indeed furthermore he should expect such performance from himself. (Long pause.) His own earlier attitudes about such matters began to seem cowardly, so he tried to divorce himself from them. That idea, however, together with the idea of responsibility, you see, was always in the background.

(Long pause at 10:38.) The earlier ones saw the two of you as apart from society’s inner workings—not divorced, now, from society—but you had both pursued policies of not following society’s mores. You prided yourselves on not having regular jobs, and being apart from certain portions of the culture. You recognized the importance of community without joining any of its organizations.

Ruburt made gestures of unconventionality. To go on public television, join the workshops and so forth would not be Ruburt’s way, even while he felt that such a course was expected of him. He thinks in terms of individuals. He distrusts crowds. (Long pause.) He has no use for congregations—but all of those feelings remained largely unexpressed in later years.

(Long pause.) Beside this, he felt that such a performance would alter the direction his work would take in ways that would be detrimental overall, for the broadening quality of that kind of discourse could only be as extensive in scope as the quality of his audience’s understanding, so that the material might become too tailored to public need or consumption—tied up in answering conventional questions—an excellent point, by the way.