“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I do not want to oversimplify, but it is as if each generation or group of generations seeks it own overall themes, about which the world will be organized. Those will appear in the private lives of citizens and in private dreams and in national events, or global ones, so that both arenas of activity are always intimately involved.

Ruburt found it very difficult to take a public stand, as separate from, say, a private one. My book and his—that is, Mass Events and God of Jane—both do take public stands. They comment clearly on issues that affect individual and private, and national or community behavior. The importance of impulses was stressed in particular, and the acceptance of such an idea is important to Ruburt’s recovery, of course—but also vital in the behavior of nations.

Years ago, when the Gallery of Silence people began to bug him, he felt threatened, afraid that he would become the brunt of fanatics or extremists. He was nevertheless determined to take some kind of a public stand—for not to do so would mean not to express himself through his books at all. He knew he would never give into that course, but he felt that some of that dates back to childhood habits and beliefs, when his very food and bed was given him by the auspices of the public.

He was taught to be very cautious lest that livelihood be taken away. The only private fears he had were also old ones, having to do with the whole false-prophet syndrome, the fear of leading people down the garden path, and so forth. Those private and public arenas became connected, however. (Long pause.) He was worried that his natural expression and search, publicly expressed at that point in history, was dangerous because it put him in the gaze of a growing band of fanatics on the one hand, and also roused old fears of a private nature, having to do with the overall validity of revelatory information.

He thought that immobility kept him at his desk working, free from any impulses to do otherwise, since for many years he believed that the spontaneous self must be harnessed toward creativity, and that left alone it would have too many other interests.

(“I was hardly aware of my ass or anything else,” she said. “I felt a whole lot of stuff there on the hostages—stuff it would take forever to get, darn it....” So we talked about what a great book Seth could do on the hostage question. “Before you got through it would cover history, religion, science—the whole works,” Jane said. I agreed that it would certainly encapsulate our whole civilized world structure before Seth finished it. “Forget it,” Jane said. “We’ve got one half done now.” She wanted to know what would happen to Seth’s book on dreams in the meantime, and I explained that it would only wait until the other project was finished. After all, it was waiting now for us to get back to it.

(I might add that Seth’s capsule commentary on the reasons for her symptoms is just what I wanted, and that we ought to keep copies of it available for easy reference. The thought came to me after supper that Jane’s doing the ESP classes probably contributed to the symptoms over the years, since the class situation was one in which she advanced her unconventional ideas to the public. I haven’t had a chance to discuss this with her, but it seems possible that her disseminating her ideas to a large number of people, in person each week, could have struck her deep-seated need for protection.... If Jane reads this material before holding a session tonight, perhaps Seth can comment.)