“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

(A long, uncomfortable pause at 9:4l.) Ruburt could have said, “I bear no responsibility for Seth’s words, since they are not mine in the usual fashion.” On the other hand, while he did critically examine our material, he insisted in those terms “that he must be responsible for it,” in that he and everyone else must take normal responsibility in a fashion for “subconscious” actions or revelatory information.

(Pause at 9:44.) There was a necessary period of time in which Ruburt and yourself experimented in several areas of psychic exploration, quite rightly picking and choosing those areas that suited you best, and ignoring others that you found for whatever reasons unsuitable. Ruburt quickly discovered that the public image of a psychic was quite different than that given to a writer, and so was the social image. As our readership grew, as you heard from readers or from some members of the media or whatever, it seemed to Ruburt that what he did best—have sessions, write his books—was not enough, that he was expected to do far more.

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.

(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.