“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt’s nonconformance took the larger framework of unconventional ideas. In the background, as a child under the organization of the Welfare Department, self-indulgence, small luxuries or too-unconventional behavior, were all dangerous in the framework chosen — the neighbors could report any transgressions to Welfare. At about this time (tapping the photo) Ruburt sat on the lap of an adult man on the front porch, and neighbors duly reported this — the idea being that sexual depravity could be involved.

When that nature grew out of the framework, he left it. All the beliefs that had once seemed so legitimate were then seen as hampering, and all their defects became plain. While he followed the framework, nothing could swerve him from it, and here (touching the photo) in this child’s picture, you already have the unswerving nature, the great spontaneity, looking for a structure that will allow it growth, and yet give the illusion of safety.

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.

That child took a different course than this woman did (Jane indicated herself as she sat in her rocker). The dogmatism prevailed. The child’s mystical nature, while strong, was not strong enough to defy the church framework, to leave it or to rise above its provided symbolism. It [the mysticism] was to be expressed, if curtailed, relatively speaking. The mind would be harnessed so that it would not ask too many questions. That child (in the photo) joined a nunnery, where she learned to regulate mystical experience according to acceptable precepts — but to express it nevertheless with some regularity, continuously, in a way of life that at least recognized its existence.

He could not accept a new framework, and he dared not let the old one go, so the symptoms became the physical materialization of these conflicts, and served many purposes. This child (in the photo), grown up in its own probability, has no such problems. The challenges are not there, either — only in latent form.

(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.

Linden uses words now as a framework to contain creativity and communication, rather than to express them. You were more free-roaming here (in the photo) as a child because you felt safer physically. Linden was far less venturesome in that respect….