“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.

(The insight, such as it was, offered many clues to our present situation. I asked that Seth discuss it if she held a session tonight. Jane had been quite blue after sleeping for a couple of hours late this afternoon—and after she’d already slept for two hours this morning. It wasn’t that her psychic work, and the books, weren’t good, I said, or that they didn’t help people, but that they didn’t fit into the world as she saw it. Seth himself had referred to her dilemma in the excerpt I’ve taken from the private session for January 26, 1981, very well.

(Her challenge, then, is that she’s never integrated fully her psychic orientation, the true source of all of her gifts, with her views of the rest of her world. I think, I added, that it was an error to blame fear of the spontaneous self going too far if given free reign—I didn’t think nature would arrange things that way, for the organism couldn’t survive for long that way. The behavior of Instream, the other psychologist at Oswego, the demand for credentials from Fell and others, the letters asking for help of various kinds—especially those from the unbalanced—all of these things and more added up in her eyes to an indictment, one might say, of one’s very nature. Clear indications that left alone without safeguards one would go too far for one’s own good.

(Jane didn’t react overly much to any of this, beyond implying at least a general sort of agreement. I was rather surprised when she agreed to hold the session. “Well, I guess I’m about ready,” she said at 9:15. “You must have got me going....”

(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.)

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.

Poetry was not considered fact, of course. It was a kind of concealed knowledge, apparent but not apparent. Later he tried straight novels, but when he let himself go his natural fiction fell into the form of fantasy, outside of the novel’s conventions into science fiction’s form—and at that time further away from the mainstream. He managed to get some of his work published, however, so that as he reached his early 30’s he had some apprenticeship under his belt.

His earliest dreams were simply to be a poet. The American novelist was laid on as a more acceptable and practical framework.

(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.

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.

He was very unsure of himself, since the entire dimension of activity was new, and at that time extremely rare in your country. The whole idea of being a “psychic” was completely new.

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.

(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.

At the same time, he was to be denied his rightful place as a writer (as I’d said earlier), to defend this new position—a position moreover that seemed to change all the time—for beside my books there was Seven, Sumari, and later Cézanne and James. Each one flying in the face of one kind of conventional misunderstanding or another. He felt that he could hardly keep up with the spontaneous self: what was it about to do next?

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.

That is only a part of the picture. He was not particularly thinking of any great fame to begin with, but the just-enough recognition—

(10:35 PM. Jane’s delivery had been surprisingly good, much more emphatic and paced than I’d expected it to be. She’d not been comfortable in her chair, though. She was pleased with the session, which I told her we ought to memorize. She even said she was going to the john after ten-and-a-half hours: “I could hold it another hour, though,” she said. I told her that kind of thing was out—that each day I planned to keep after her to go at decent intervals.

(The wind was strong, rattling the metal blinds of the west side of the house. The temperature had dropped below freezing after a fairly nice day. The ground was bare, and had been for many days.)