“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When that flow is relatively unimpeded then he is naturally attracted to subjective activity and to performance in the natural world as well. He enjoys seeing people then. To enjoy seeing people is a different thing than expecting yourself to be a public personality, however. Ruburt has been trying out a system of values that is not naturally his own. He has told himself that his art must be used to help people primarily—as if that had been his main goal all along. Art then becomes a method of doing something else—and that idea runs directly contrary to the basic integrity of art, and to art as he truly understands it to be. He therefore often felt forced to do what before he had done because he wanted to.

(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.

He felt that your visitors came to see the public image (as they certainly did, I’d say), and felt inferior by contrast. To some extent he became divorced from some of his own feelings, for they seemed now beneath him.

He had always enjoyed being somewhat disreputable—had seen himself and you prowling around the edges of society (as Jane had said earlier today)—not simply observers of it but to a large extent apart from its foibles, and certainly not mired in all of its conventional misunderstandings. He enjoyed dealing with it by sending the written word out into the public arena. He insisted upon that—the publication of his work. The books were to be his public platform.

(10:28.) He is proud of that translation of private creative experience into the artistic public act of publication. He is not a performer, however, in the same way that an actor is, whose art requires for its best execution the lively responsive immediately present audience. He did not want to be a public personality of that kind.

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.

(Yes. And one that Jane and I soon became aware of even on that first very limited tour we took to help publicize The Seth Material.)