“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I had another of my “insights” while painting this morning, and talked it over with Jane after supper tonight. It was, simply, that we were wrong to blame imagined excesses of the spontaneous self for her problems—that really the trouble lay in her discovery that with the psychic abilities she was destined to find herself outside conventional creative authority: a person who learned that she would have to protect her very integrity as a person against charges of fraud. Publishers don’t put disclaimers on novels or poetry, I said. I added that Seth—and we—must have covered this ground many times over the years; yet now I felt that once again I was “on to something important.”

(She’d obviously, I thought, expected recognition by her peers in the writing field when she matured, with her obvious talents. Yet she’d found this deep yearning snatched away with the advent of her psychic abilities—goodbye to all of those accepted reviews, the critical success, even the money, that would go along with the conventional acceptable public image of the successful writer of good quality poetry and/or fiction. I said that most “successful?” poetry and fiction might not penetrate very deeply into the human condition, compared with the understanding her own psychic gifts offered, but it would have been safe and accepted by her peers. What more could anyone ask of life, I demanded ironically?

(No wonder, then, the retreat from the world, even the refusal to leave the house. Protection from the world must be had at all costs, even while she, with my help, persisted in using her abilities to some extent at least through the books. I wondered how much about all of this she’d never let Seth say. No wonder we sought privacy more and more: any public exposure came to be avoided automatically, as part of the protective coloration.

(She’s been sleeping much better, but with interspersed bouts of restlessness and discomfort in her backside and legs. Right now she was also uncomfortable as she waited for Seth to come through. Earlier today I’d told her I realized how cleverly she’d engineered her activities so that she didn’t go to the john very often. Right then, she hadn’t been to the bathroom since noon. “I’d go if I had to,” she protested, but I answered that she’d simply trained her body to wait as long as possible for such natural acts; then she could avoid all the discomfort of getting into the bathroom and on the john, etc. I added that I supposed now she’d work it so that she only went to the john once before going to bed after the session. I wondered if she was trying to set a record for holding it. By way of contrast, I wanted to ask Seth to comment on the good things her psychic abilities have accomplished. But right at this time she can barely get from her chair to sit on the john or the bed—literally.)

His creative abilities led him beyond the precepts of that church, creatively speaking, at a fairly early age—though the actual breaking-off point did not occur in fact until he was in his teens. He was fairly young, then, however, when he first encountered conflicts between creativity as such, intuitive knowledge, and other people’s ideas about reality.

(9:32.) Again, his natural abilities kept leading him, so it seemed, away from the straight novel framework into the science fiction format, where at that time he discovered that science fiction was not given any particular honor in the literary field. He decided to break away from it. Again he tried some straight novels. At the same time his abilities were examining the world at large, and your own worlds, as they were unfolding.

You both had more questions at that time than you had ever had in your lives before, and your growing practical knowledge of the world made you each realize how little the species knew in vital areas. It was more or less at that point that Ruburt’s abilities seemingly started, or that his psychic initiation began suddenly.

There are multitudinous elements operating against such an initiation in your society, and particularly these operated back in those days when the sessions first began. There is a natural desire to want the respect of one’s fellows, to avoid social taboos or ostracism. Those issues were encountered at that time because Ruburt’s abilities thrust them through their surfaces. His abilities grew despite the society’s inhibiting factors. It did take Ruburt some time to fully understand how his work might perhaps be regarded. The fact that I could also write books was of the greatest benefit, of course (dryly, almost with a smile) —and no one was more surprised than Ruburt to discover that I could do so.

(Long pause at 10:20.) The public image is bound to make him feel inferior if he takes it too seriously. That always stimulates his idea of responsibility. It is his public image as a psychic, of course, not as a writer, that here is the issue. In a fashion we are delivering source materials for each person to interpret and enjoy. It may serve as the source material for several different kinds of disciplines, or schools or whatever. (Pause.) It will serve to inspire others, but each person is responsible for his or her own life, and Ruburt does not have a private clientele, nor is he temperamentally suited to use his psychic abilities to track people down or to serve as a therapist. That narrows his abilities too specifically and holds him down from other kinds of explorations for which he is highly equipped and quite proficient.