“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) Your mail presents you with glimpses of the people who read our books, from all walks of life, in all circumstances. You cannot follow their lives through from beginning to ending as you can in a book. You cannot write their “books” of life for them. You can comment very briefly on the small glimpses you have been given of another’s reality. The true interchange comes as those people themselves read our books, of course, and where our ideas intersect with their lives.

(Long pause.) Ruburt has at times gone overboard in a feeling of responsibility toward those who write in need. The Sinful Self, so-called, now, is only too willing to accept such responsibility, for it believes to some extent that such responsibility is a kind of penance for its own shortcomings. (Long pause.) Ruburt is not responsible at all in such areas to hold sessions for others, or to provide that particular kind of individual help.

(Long pause.) He grew up of course with many responsibilities in connection with the care of his mother. Again, there were no known rules of procedure (long pause) to follow as far as his own career was concerned. The idea of responsibility, however, began to overweigh the joy of creativity. So it seemed to Ruburt that the books were not considered to be enough: he was expected to do all of those other things beside. (Long pause.) That kind of responsibility runs directly counter to creativity. You understand that I must simplify that to some extent, but generally speaking creativity does not deal with questions so much like “this is true, or this is false,” it says this is, period.

Creativity often deals with material that is not known, not cut-and-dried, not even immediately useful, perhaps—so Ruburt would feel, for example, sometimes at least, that poetry was not responsible, or even that his own spontaneous activities were not responsible unless they were immediately useful in practical terms. At one time or another, the idea of responsibility was overlaid upon his ideas of work. All of this made him feel that he was not living up to expectations, that he was to some extent a failure for not doing all of those things.

(Long pause at 9:22.) Now nothing is all that simple, so there would be changes in his attitudes: He would tell himself, for example, that television or whatever would fritter away his time, or at other occasions other fears would rise so that the Sinful Self would think “Suppose such activity succeeded only too well, leading whole groups of people away from established systems of belief?” (Long pause.) There seemed to be little resolution. The only resolution of course is the realization that no such responsibilities actually exist. If he must think in terms of responsibility, then the only responsibility he has is to express the spirit of life as it is most naturally felt in his experience, through the development of his abilities in their natural flow (underlined).

(Very long pause.) People often react to their beliefs about the kinds of persons they should be, and to imagined events. In such a way that the imagined ones are as real in their effect upon their lives as physical events are. In some cases the imagined events never do show. A person may see himself or herself, say, as a daring explorer, an inventor, an opera star or whatever, and react against such images. They may be perfectly normal people—even gifted in other fields rather than in the specific field of their dreams. However accomplished they might be, however, some consider themselves failures because they have not lived up to those ghost images. Now there are reasons for such behavior. In Ruburt’s case, however, he felt that he should (underlined) act on all the other ways I specified, though he did not want to. Again, on occasion he promised himself that if he walked normally he would be only too glad to perform in such ways. This simply added to the threatening picture. He was also afraid that spontaneously he might want to do such things after all, as if his spontaneous self would work against his better interests.

(9:42.) All of this finally led Ruburt to feel that he had little room to move in. The feeling of gloom deepened. The release of those panicky feelings has been important. He has been doing well in that regard. You were of course of great help to him this morning. And talking out his feelings allowed for the release of energy, physically speaking. Frank’s gadget can now serve as an excellent natural physical therapy, particularly useful at this stage, sending the message also that Ruburt is willing to let such relaxation occur.