“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt has tried, as I said before, to use his abilities while being very cautious. He has tried expressing those abilities while feeling he needed all kinds of safeguards, both because he partially shared the belief that energy was dangerous, and because he also feared that other people would react to him in that fashion.

In your times the individual problems of masses of people are bound up with such issues, and as they work toward their own solutions, then in their own ways they help solve problems at the level of world action. You are quite correct: Ruburt spent many years “building up his defenses.” Determined to use his abilities, while also determined to protect himself, and from (pause) any danger that those abilities themselves might carry with them.

Your country, for all of its obvious errors, still is one in which such issues can best be worked out both philosophically and practically. Now in both of your lives, you have managed to express creative abilities to advantage, to draw upon these not only at isolated periods of your lives, or in partial form, but in such a fashion that they have provided you with continuing frameworks of self-discovery and creativity—so when you are counting accomplishments, remember that (in reference to question 2.

It has provided you with an extra framework through which to view reality. Now yours is, say, the poetry of painting. Now in the philosophical area we are discussing, you are also dealing with imaginative leaps, with casts of mind and spirit that are as rare as true artistic ability is. In that area you are asked to merge philosophical insights with the practical, everyday nitty-gritty of life. You are asked to bring those delicate understandings to practical flowering—a considerable task, and doubly so when the philosophical issues involved go so against the established grain of historically accepted knowledge.

(We discussed Seth’s reference on page 85 to Jane fearing that others might actually look upon her as dangerous because of her abilities. At first I’d thought this a new insight on Seth’s part, but we decided that it wasn’t, that he’d covered this ground in other material from a variety of viewpoints. There’s something about his simple statement, though, that is intriguing—that others, in addition to considering that Jane was antireligious, say, would also think of her as dangerous.)