“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

In your terms, the intersection with probabilities occurred one day in an interview the child had with a priest. The event, in Ruburt’s terms, with its results in your probability, is mentioned in his Rich Bed (see Note 4). The child in seventh or eighth grade wrote a poem, expressing the desire to be a nun, and brought it to a parish priest. In your probability, the priest told the child that she was needed by her mother; but intuitively he saw that Ruburt’s mysticism would not fit into the church organization.

(Intently:) Ruburt here chose the writing structure, and has stuck to it as unswervingly as he once stuck to the church, yet always seeking a new framework. For a while he idealized you. Your guidance and strength were his framework. When it became apparent that you were also human, and not a framework, he became frightened. When you encouraged the emergence and expression of his mysticism, then you could no longer act, he felt, as a framework to contain it. By then it seemed to threaten the joint structure of your lives. He knew intuitively that you also used artistic creation as a buffer between yourself and mystical expression.

(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.

[...] As in the Introductory Notes, I want to stress Jane’s role as the creative artist, disseminating her personal view of a larger inner reality, and her intuitive and conscious comprehension of at least some aspects of that reality; for such understanding can easily elude our Western-oriented, materialistic, technological outlook.

[...] It was obvious to her in her youth that none of her friends wrote poetry, or talked about the subject matter of much of her own poetry.³ Jane intuitively felt her own nature, without trying to define it. [...]