“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane has felt somewhat better the last couple of days, and I’ve been hoping that what we’re learning is “responsible” for that improvement. I told her as we waited for the session that I was all for more material on the responsibility question, for I see it as the key to setting her free. I said also that her decision to give up doing publicity, made just recently, might be helping her feel better.

(“I guess I’m confused,” Jane said at 8:55. “I feel responsible to get more on responsibility, I guess, where this afternoon I thought I’d like him to finish that chapter in his book and get started on another one. Then you came out and said you’d like more on responsibility, so....” I explained that my idea was only to get more material on what Seth had begun yesterday—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do material on other things too.

(At 9 PM I was thinking of telling Jane to forget the session when she remarked, “I almost feel him around.” I don’t think we’ve ever “abandoned” a session once we sat for it, but was willing to do it if need be. Then:)

(Pause.) For many years you both pursued your arts despite living amidst such cultural beliefs. The pursuit of art was considered egotistical in a negative meaning of the word—selfish, childish or adolescent, and indeed many psychologists of the recent past considered it in the light of prolonged adolescence, or saw it as a sign of the individuals’ refusal to fully accept an adult role in life.

(Long pause.) In an industrialized society, people were trained to fit into assembly line productions. The imagination was itself considered suspect. It was felt that creativity served no responsible end in society. Again, you both pursued your own courses nevertheless. You did so, however, in the light of that psychological climate, so that while you went your own ways you also reacted to the social environment: you tried to show other people that you were indeed responsible—more, that you worked (underlined) not only as hard as others, but often harder (underlined).

To some extent you convinced yourselves that such creative activity was indeed in some respects more work certainly than play. In your own art you worked relatively slowly, measured out your pleasure in a fashion, even thinking sometimes in the past that your talent required (underlined) periods of indecision and difficulty. Often you emphasized impediments. It seemed almost sacrilegious to think that the production of excellent art could involve fun—or worse, an active sense of irresponsibility, a joyful sense of ease, so that if a painting came too quickly you could not trust it.

This artistic sense of responsibility was given a thicker coat by what seemed to be psychic responsibility: it seemed to Ruburt that he should use his abilities primarily to help others, or to help solve the world’s problems, or to cast some light into man’s condition. Certainly the attitude of some correspondents was involved there. Actually, however, it was the simple extension of such a feeling into the psychic realm, where it was further hardened by many religious views.

Ruburt saddled himself with a feeling of responsibility, however. At the same time of course he naturally resented such dictates. They tempered his own inspiration, narrowed his spontaneity. The idea of that kind of responsibility is extremely persuasive, however, in your society. (Long pause.) Because women were somehow regarded as less responsible than males, more easily given to frivolity, Ruburt also tried even harder to insure that he was acting in a responsible way.

If creativity itself was sometimes considered irresponsible, or “feminine,” or adolescent, then psychic activity, he discovered, seemed to be held in an even murkier light, in which the abilities themselves were sometimes thought of not as creative enhancements but as symptoms of feminine weakness and irresponsibility. He has recognized that, of course, to some degree, and written about it.

It added considerably, however, to the thick coat of responsibility that he placed about his own shoulders. He is still harder on women than he is on men in that regard. In that light then again, to stand somewhat apart from my material, to question it as a matter of principle, became a sign of responsibility. It showed that he was not a frivolous female, fancifully following each stray imaginative trance image.

(10:05 PM. “I got something at the tail end of the session that he didn’t say,” Jane told me. “I don’t know whether it was right or not—it involved you. I don’t know if you’ll agree: You can check with the pendulum. The idea of the trouble you gave yourself with the rib was connected with the guys coming to work here, to give you an excuse to do your thing and be isolated so they wouldn’t ask you to help, or strain yourself physically because you were already hurt. I got it at the very end. I don’t know why he didn’t say that. I waited to see if he was going to give it, and when he didn’t, I did.”

(I would like to add that I found the session to be excellent as usual, but also found some of the material sad and depressing: It looked like we had a lot of wasted years involved in negative thinking, and that we were now struggling to get out of or rid of. At the moment I couldn’t decide if everyone had such hassles in life, or if Jane and I had managed to create sets of beliefs that were indeed “beauts” and quite unusual. I was afraid our beliefs ruled our lives so completely, were so pervasive, that we’d never get out of their mazes. As I asked Paul O’Neill last month: “How do you be objective about something when you’re inside of it?”)