“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 8 PM tonight ABC TV News had begun a three-hour dissertation on the whole American-Iranian-hostage situation, narrated by Pierre Salinger. The program was fascinating, and was actually a sequel to a previous program of equal length that ABC had broadcast a few days ago; we’d seen much of that one, too. I heard Jane listening to this evening’s segment while I was working in the writing room. What a tale of intrigue, personalities, and beliefs it was. And as soon as Seth opened the session, I understood at once how he was going to link that tale with Jane’s own hassles.

Now under many situations people, again, behave in the same manner. They use portions of themselves as hostages—or as in Ruburt’s case they use a portion of themselves not so much as hostages, but they take a part of the self under “protective custody.” This almost always occurs when there are misunderstandings in particular areas between the picture of the self or the world as painted by the intellect, and the picture of the world or of the self painted by the emotions.

Ruburt took a portion of himself into protective custody—not wishing to do that portion any damage, but simply to restrain it, to teach it discipline. Some people take portions of themselves, again, as hostages, restraining such portions with the idea of punishing them for imagined wrongs, or for actions not understood.

(Pause at 9:20.) In either case, however, portions of the self are hampered, restrained, and their expression drastically reduced, and there are bound to be repercussions. Ruburt’s body suffered whether or not he intended it to, because value fulfillment was being further denied. In the case of hostages and those in protective custody, a certain kind of enforced isolation is also bound to happen —and to some degree or another, the individual involved will display in certain areas the same kind of exaggerated postures between various portions of the self, as the Americans and the Iranians display in their behavior together.

(Long pause.) By the very fact that a portion of the self is kept, say, in a sort of protective custody, it is kept in isolation, which means that it is not kept up on current events. Like political hostages, it does not get all of the mail—or the mail it does get is apt to be censored, so it is not operating with a full set of facts. That alone of course prolongs the difficulty.