“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We’d thought that Seth might refer to them in the session for last Monday, but none was held because once again Jane was so relaxed on the couch after supper. She was also somewhat blue and discouraged. In fact, I hadn’t expected a session tonight until she called me at 8:40, so relaxed was she. She’s been sleeping much better generally, though, is still taking a nap in the late morning as well as our usual nap break just before supper. She’s also been heading for bed a half hour earlier at night.

(She was very quiet as session time approached, but wasn’t too comfortable in her chair. I was quiet too—we’d been more or less that way all day. “I think it’ll be short,” she finally said.)

I do not want to go into a history of culture here, but your organizations historically have largely been built upon your religious concepts, which have indeed been extremely rigid. In the light of those concepts, artistic expression has been channeled, focused, directed along certain lines. It has been discouraged along other lines. The repressive nature of Christian thought in the Middle Ages, for example, is well known.

In medieval times to be excommunicated was no trivial incident, but an event harkening severance that touched the soul, the body, and all political, religious and economic conditions by which the two were tied together.

Many people’s economic well-being of course was dependent upon the church in one way or another, and in reincarnational terms many millions of people alive today were familiar then with such conditions. The nunneries and monasteries were long-time social and religious institutions, some extremely rigorous, while others were religiously oriented in name only. But there is a long history of the conflicts between creative thought, heresy, excommunication, or worse, death. All of those factors were involved in one way or another in the fabric of Ruburt’s nightmare material.

In the time those fears originated, he shared the belief framework of Christianity, so that he believed that outside of that framework there could indeed be nothing but chaos, or the conventional atheism of science, in which the universe was at the mercy of meaningless mechanistic laws—laws, however, that operated without logic, but more importantly laws that operated without feeling.

He [Ruburt] was afraid that if he went too far he would discover that he had catapulted himself into a realm where both answers and questions were meaningless, and in which no sense was to be found. To do that is one thing, but to take others with you would be, he felt, unforgivable—and in the framework of those fears, as his work became better known he became even more cautious.

By such tactics the church managed to hold on to an entire civilization for centuries. (Long pause.) Ruburt well knew even as a child that such structures had served their time, and his poetry provided a channel through which he could express his own views as he matured. Later the old fears, if they surfaced, were not encountered. They seemed beneath him, unworthy or cowardly—but in any case their validity as feelings was not recognized or understood.

Ruburt did initiate a small religious order in the 16th Century, in France, and he was in love for many years with the man he met in his dream—a cleric. The love was not consummated, but it was passionate and enduring nonetheless on both of their parts.

The name Normandy comes to mind, and the name Abelard. The dream came to remind Ruburt of those connections, but also to remind him that his life even then was enriched by a long-held love relationship. The two corresponded frequently, met often, and in their ways conspired to alter many of the practices that were abhorrent yet held as proper church policy.

(We speculated that Abelard is a famous name, historically and in the arts, though we couldn’t think of any specific connections. But like Normandy, it must apply to a number of people and topics.)