“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.”

(Our talk lasted almost an hour in spite of myself, for I didn’t want her to get upset before a session. I felt that we couldn’t afford to miss sessions these days. Her reading the NY Times Book Review each week had reminded me recently that her intent perusal of that publication represented a striving toward something she was not about to achieve—conventional recognition in creative writing.

You are in charged waters indeed with your discussion. Most of the ideas that you stated were highly pertinent, applying specifically to Ruburt’s situation —but very touchy for him. As a child, couched in the Catholic Church, his poetry was a method of natural expression, a creative art, and also the vehicle through which he examined himself, the world as he knew it, and the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church.

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.

I have mentioned this on occasion—that he felt quite different from his contemporaries. Many gifted children do, and he used various kinds of protective coloring. No matter what he was taught in Catholic school or later in the public one, his intuitions, wedded to his creative capacities, led him to question established views.

He could have tried to publish the material in camouflaged form through fiction, and he was far more tempted to take such a line than perhaps you realized. Had one of his straight novels been accepted at that time, the story might be different somewhat. He recognized, however, the excellent quality in his own newer writings and in my own work also. He recognized the elements of mystery and creativity involved in the entire affair, and realized that he could not after all camouflage all of that, and so took the course upon which you both embarked.

As he continued with his books and mine, he became more bewildered, in that there seemed to be no literary framework in which they were legitimately reviewed. It was as if he were considered a writer no longer, or as if the writing itself, while considered good enough, was also considered quite beside the point—of secondary concern, and in the psychic field the very word “creative” often has suspicious connotations. Many such people want the truth, in capital letters, in quite literal form, without creativity slurring the message, so to speak, or blurring the absolute edges of fact and fiction.

At the same time, however, over a period of time he began to hold back creatively to some extent on inspiration itself, wondering where it might lead him, and this caused part of his physical difficulties (long pause), the physical blockage of course reflecting the inner one. Part of that blockage was also directly related to his ideas of work and responsibility.

This is because his position is unique, in that he is dealing in areas that serve as thresholds, where ordinary creativity is accelerated and goes beyond itself, where fact turns into fiction, and fiction into fact. In those unknown realms, from which all psychological events are formed, he wants to fly ahead theoretically—that is, to delve through my books and through his own into ideas that still await, and feels somewhat angry because it seems that excellent theoretical material is overlooked by others to a large extent, while being used as a Band-Aid to help the current problems of the people.

When you want to be a landscape painter, at least you know what a landscape is. You have your brushes and colors to work with. In Ruburt’s case, there are no definite boundaries, in certain ways, to the dimensions of that creativity —no specific methods, no specific pathways, and it is for that reason that he tried to exert such balancing force.

A focus upon natural inspiration, spontaneous creativity, psychic exploration, will automatically help relieve the physical situation, if this is done with some understanding.