“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.”

(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.

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.