“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Yesterday morning I read Jane Tuesday’s session, concerning her exaggerated sense of responsibility, and so forth, and it seemed to have an almost immediate effect upon her: She became very relaxed. We had a discussion about ways to minimize that feeling of responsibility, should it persist to any degree. One of the topics was the mail. I thought of Jane confining her replies to correspondents via postcard only, or at least only rarely sending out the letters with a longer reply to someone truly in need.

(However, I told her we might have to dispense with answering the mail if no other relief is obtained—anything to cut down on the feeling of responsibility. I did mention one good point, I thought: If she must be involved with ideas of responsibility, then let her think that she has already fulfilled her responsibility to help others, through the work/books she’s already done. No need then to carry it further. She did have feelings of panic to a milder degree at times throughout the day.

(I could add that yesterday and today especially the mail had embodied the extremes of response Jane often gets to her work—from the incoherent to the very complimentary, from people literally begging for relief from possession, say, to inquisitive, thoughtful letters from psychologists and other professional people. But I caught both of us talking about the “negative” letters rather than the positive ones.

(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.

(Pause.) The feeling of responsibility to help those in desperate need is but one facet, however, for he has felt a responsibility (underlined) to get our material to the people as soon as possible—a responsibility to appear on television or otherwise, to promote our ideas, or to present them to the world—a responsibility that I have not encouraged.

(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).

Actually, of course, the creative abilities follow a larger vein of knowledge, and are responsible to themselves. They also adhere to a greater order that is far superior to ideas of responsibility as they are usually interpreted at normal levels.