“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(10:39.) In the meantime, Island Three’s spirit has been thinking. The spirits of island One and Two did not appeal to it (or to him or her in any of these cases, if you prefer) at all. It was determined to retain its own identity. Yet it too has become lonely, and it has seen endless coral paths reaching out from itself.

Its spirit followed one such path and came upon a desert island upon which nothing grew. Figuratively, its image was appalled. “How can you stand such barrenness?” it calls to the spirit of this fourth island.

This is the end of our analogy. The spirit of each of the four islands was itself intact, and the interchanges were chosen. You are not islands unto yourselves, except when you choose to be. Each counterpart views reality from its own viewpoint, and there is never any invasion.

(Nor have I checked up on “Unknown” Reality’s bulk. This was the second time in three weeks that Jane had mentioned a two-volume work; see the opening notes for the 721st session. I wondered aloud whether she might be getting herself used to such an idea. I added that I didn’t think she need worry about readers following Seth’s material — that certainly many others are just as curious as we are about where “Unknown” Reality is going.

(An aside: Jane said that toward the end of her delivery she’d been bothered by traffic noise. It was a warm if snowy night, and we had a kitchen window open for fresh air; all through her delivery I’d been aware of the traffic ceaselessly negotiating the intersection just west of “our” apartment house, of course, and had asked her to repeat a number of words. We do intend to move out of our two apartments early next year, as soon as I finish the illustrations for Jane’s Dialogues — that is, we’re going to start looking for a house we can buy.

So in one century you were Nebene, and Ruburt was indeed the “prostitute” priestess,³ and so did you challenge each other, as in different ways you do now, with tendencies that appear to be opposites, but are instead different ways of approaching the same kind of challenge. If you could understand, it would help in many areas you do not as yet suspect.

Now in a way your mother and Ruburt were counterparts; for Ruburt lives in a trust of individual abilities toward which your mother yearned; and Ruburt gives a love to you which your mother yearned to give — yet while retaining her identity — to a man. Your mother understood love’s purpose and felt its presence in Ruburt. And at the same time she was actually annoyed when she felt that you were not following your [commercial] artistic ability through, despite her surface misunderstandings of it.⁶

She identified with you to some extent, and to some unrecognized degree was “only masculine, now,” in her understanding of power. I hope you will recognize what I mean: but in the light of her understanding at the time, children were to be used as power, as a man might use weapons.⁷

Stella Butts changed and grew. But in certain terms she was the masculine center of the family, emotions or not, the aggressive one; and speaking conventionally now, your father (Robert Sr.) accepted the more passive creative role. This has meaning in terms of your [unpublished] information⁸ involving the masculine and feminine aspects that united and separated your parents. Your father would have been more “comfortable” as a woman, and she as a male. Yet for their own purposes they each chose to experience the other side of the coin, so to speak.

3. For material and references concerning my Nebene life in the first century A.D., see Session 721, with notes 9 and 12. Seth’s remark here, that “Ruburt was indeed the ‘prostitute’ priestess,” concerns unpublished material we plan to eventually study in depth.

6. From her viewpoint my mother was, indeed, quite baffled when I turned away from a well-paying career in commercial art toward a very risky one in “fine art,” or painting. The year was 1953, and I’d just met Jane. My mother was 61 years old, I was 34, and Jane was 24. See the few additional details in Note 10 for the 679th session, in Volume 1.

7. And at various times through my early years, I understood how my mother used me (and my two brothers) as “weapons,” or tools or objects, against my father. “Weapons,” perhaps, is too strong a word, I think now, for I don’t remember my mother blatantly encouraging “her” children to defy their father. Yet we would often end up being on her side. As I grew up I came to feel that my father was both strongly surprised and disappointed by the wife and children he’d chosen to be involved with.