“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Each of you, again, chose your parents and environment. You spoke in your notes (two days ago) of precognition in connection with art — an excellent point. Precognition in those terms also applies at your birth, when ahead of time you are quite aware on unconscious levels of those conditions that you will meet. You have chosen them and projected them ahead of you, out into the medium of time.

The placid-looking child (in the photo) was as dogmatic and unyielding in some respects as Ruburt has ever been. Yet leaving the church framework, Ruburt fastened upon the mind as opposed to the intuitions. The child here was convinced that statues of Christ moved. Without a framework to contain that kind of experience, the growing girl began to squash it. Mystical experience became acceptable only through poetry or art, where it was accepted as creative, but not real enough to get him into trouble, or to upset the “new” framework. The new framework threw aside such superstitious nonsense. The mind would be harnessed, and art became the acceptable translator of mystical experience, and a cushion between that experience and the self. He threw some of the baby out with the bathwater.

(Pause.) For various reasons already given, concerning your joint relationship, and your own purposes (to me), it has taken some time for a newer, suitable framework to form itself — one in which Ruburt is free to pursue mystic experience in a practical structure; one in which unconventionality of thought is allowed to continue freely. He felt that this could outgrow the framework of his art, as it did that of the church. The physical symptoms⁸ served quite literally as a framework in which spontaneity was to some extent at least allowed a mental and psychic freedom, until he felt secure.

For all of the reasons given — and they are clearly given (in personal sessions) — he was afraid that spontaneity, mental or physical, would threaten the long-accepted framework of your joint lives. If he went spontaneously forward in mystical experience, then, given his ideas, it threatened the conventional acceptance of his art. Conventional ideas of art and writing, upon which the old framework, now, was dependent, no longer fit.

(11:05.) He had you to consider. This experience of his was taking time from your art as well as his own, to his way of thinking. At the same time, the mystical nature rejoiced at its opportunity, and sensed its potential. Ruburt was determined to go ahead (louder) — he was also determined to keep the old structures and to ignore the cracks in them. In part his loyalty to you was connected, and his responsibility as he saw it to keep you focused as an artist, and to let nothing distract you. Yet here he was distracting you.

For a while your joint communication system was shaky. He was afraid to go ahead. The symptoms kept him at his job, at home, and allowed him to concentrate without outside distractions; kept him writing, with mystical experience dutifully translated into art.

(From Seth’s delivery following last break, I’ve deleted less than two short sentences of very personal material. Obviously, Jane and I did choose to meet the challenges presented by the emergence of her psychic abilities 11 years ago. Those “new” abilities offered creative possibilities so apparent that, given our natures, we had little desire to do otherwise; beneath our doubts and questions we intuitively felt the rightness of our decisions. I found that I was able to contribute psychically in certain ways, other than just recording the sessions. And to have at least some of our deepest desires and motivations brought so clearly to conscious awareness, through psychic means or any other way, was more than we’d thought possible in previous years. We found such information especially valuable within the larger social context. With all of this, I was also eager to acquire whatever knowledge was available about both the philosophy and the art of painting.

(Picking up the photo of me:) Not in this picture, but quite alive, was your brother Linden. You insisted upon using your abilities, and tried for years to fit them into the commercial pattern, where they were accepted financially and socially, and in terms of your self-image. Finally you grew outside of the structure.¹⁰ When you did, you made the artificial division in which good art would not sell — but you would do it anyway.

The three of us got along well as children, although our natures and interests varied considerably. All of us went through grade school and high school in Sayre, a railroad town in northeastern Pennsylvania: Our father settled his family there in 1923 when he opened an auto-repair and battery shop. The separations in the family began to happen after Linden and I graduated from high school, left Sayre, and started to work our respective ways through college and an art school. Then came long periods of military service for the three of us (World War II for Linden and me). Years passed before I understood how much my parents had been affected by the departure of their children.

10. I gave up my commitment to commercial art in 1953, when I was 34 years old. My intuitive desire to do so had been growing slowly for several years. The act of separation finally became conscious and deliberate when I moved to a small community near Saratoga Springs, N.Y. (where Jane lived), to temporarily help an artist-writer friend produce a syndicated “comic” strip. This was the last commercial work I was to do for some time; I finally understood that I was simply more interested in painting pictures than in doing anything else. Since I believe that each of us creates our own reality in the most precise terms, it can hardly be a coincidence that at this time of decision my friend introduced Jane and me — for she was just as devoted to writing as I was to painting.