“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane had reread my list of questions for Seth, based on this last group of sessions, and referred to often. After supper we’d talked about questions 2 and 13, the same ones we’d asked that Seth discuss in another recent private session; he hadn’t done so yet, though. And, of course, his material throughout these sessions can’t but help touch upon various facets pertaining to the questions. So upon that premise, the questions are being discussed all the time.)

Ruburt’s symptoms are not his challenge this time, as you asked (in question 13), but the philosophical connotations behind his difficulties certainly do involve his challenges this time.

Ruburt’s difficulties are based upon certain philosophical dilemmas, that are his own personally—dilemmas, however, that also belong to your time, and are therefore largely responsible for the difficulties in your historical period. To some extent or another, again, the entire affair is an endeavor in which all persons have their parts to play. The issues involved affect, for example, Ruburt’s personal mobility. They also are connected with the much larger social issues, such as the uses to which your nuclear technology will be put.

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.

You are alive to express the individualistic life-force that is the source of your being. You have been taught not to trust that energy, however, and in one way or another your social programs and your governments themselves are based upon the proposition that man must be protected from his own nature —a nature seen as unsavory at best.

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.

One of the main issues is the recognition of the fact that energy is good, that its expression is to be naturally encouraged, and that through such encouragement each individual best fulfills his or her life, and also adds to the development and understanding of the species.

(Pause.) In one way or another, Ruburt always understood that his natural leanings led him in such directions. It is easy to say that he overdid his defenses. (Pause.) Those defenses also served, however, to some degree (underlined) as a part of a larger learning process, and as a way of containing knowledge that he wanted and felt he required.

Exactly what were the mechanisms of such defense systems, as individuals used them? Nations use them in the same way. All of this can be quite difficult to explain. It would be highly unusual for Ruburt to have been untouched by the belief systems of his times—particularly if he had set out to change them. (Pause.) You are not simply trying to look at the world differently, for example, or to change a hypothetical reality, but to creatively bring about some version of a creative and artistic vision that results not simply in greater poems or paintings, but in greater renditions of reality (all very intently.

(10:06. With a smile:) When you want to express darkness you might paint your canvas with black instead of your magic white (a la William Alexander), so that then the use of lighter colors upon it will indicate more clearly the quality of light, at least for the painting’s purposes. So to some extent or another, Ruburt’s own adherence to past beliefs of a “negative” nature were also used in his life itself, appearing as symptoms that only the more pointed out the necessity for light, and the need for the greater understandings toward which he was searching.

This does not mean that he was fated to do any such thing, that it would not be done more easily in other fashions, but you can see some correspondence there by looking at his (underlined) paintings, and the vivid use of contrasting colors that are not subtle. This is of course one way of looking at the entire issue. The same philosophical dilemma, again, lies at a basis for your mass events. Ruburt has been using television programs and such cultural data as a basis for some of his own dreams. In such a way he sees his own personal situation more clearly—but he also sees the world situation as it reflects the same kind of philosophical questions.

Ruburt then has indeed been involved in working out his dilemmas, both in their private and public nature through the use of such dream techniques, the subsequent feelings aroused in the daytime, and the intuitive resolutions and insights that then occur. He has not “given up” the book sessions, by the way, but suspended them for these sessions, to give you more time, but they are merely in abeyance.

(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.)