“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.

(Jane did decide to have a session tonight, though, since we’d missed last night’s, and we had company—Rhoads and Gallaghers—scheduled for Friday night. We waited a long time for the session to begin. I was tired and discouraged. Behind me in the fireplace our raccoon friends were mildly active. Otherwise the evening was quite cool and very quiet.)

(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.

(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.