“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

He had healthy enough body concepts that had to be minimized to give him the symptoms, and this was done by reactivating beliefs he had “grown out of” before his symptoms. His mother gave him the idea that he was not graceful, for example, and this idea was reactivated. He was not allowed to take physical education because he was “not strong enough, and too high strung” when he was in high school. He was told not to run, but walk, to slow down because it was too dangerous to go fast, because he was too nervous. Now those beliefs, which he had dispensed with, were reactivated as aids, and they are the ones that now must be tackled.

So he was keeping the terms of the old contract. In the meantime you had learned so much, and so had he, but he still interpreted what he learned in the line of those old beliefs. He now realizes he has what he wanted—a creative framework in which to exist, with some financial independence. But he is now faced with body beliefs that have been built up as a result of the previous conflicts, and those are what you have to combat.

There was some resentment against you, for he could not accept what he considered as a sacrifice on your part in jobs throughout your life, and yet he was angry because you would not do, he thought, what he had done—try to do your creative best, and then force the marketplace to take it. So if you had a job he felt you were sacrificing, but if you did not then he expected you to paint your best, and make the world take it, and pay for it.

He believes now that he is in a pretty fair position, one he can happily accept creatively and financially. He has also learned along the way. It was not really great wealth, but some acceptable framework of financial security he was after, and some assurance that his books would bring him this, along with the freedom of creativity as he understood it.

He felt when or if he spoke of this you were deeply hurt, thinking he did not understand your sacrifice—the job, but he did not want your sacrifice. He wanted you free to do your painting. He thought that you would not be satisfied to quit unless he had a job, and this he could not do because of his own commitment to his work.

He knew quite well that you would be both casting yourselves adrift financially in conventional terms. He remembered in the past how he felt withdrawing money from the bank. He was quite aware of his own fears also, but he felt that the stimulus would offset these, and that you would not add your courage to his when he was faltering. Unless he did something, he felt, the status quo would continue.

He has determined that he will not push you in any way. Because of your age difference he took it for granted that you knew more than he, and when he had pushed you to Florida it had not worked. He determined he would never push you again.

He felt you should know this. He would never bring it up. [...] You would think he would not understand, or that he did not appreciate what you were doing. With what he was putting himself through, unnecessarily—but he did not realize it—then he could not understand why you did not insist on doing what you said you wanted to do. [...]

Here, for his own reasons, as given much earlier, he latched upon what he considered and interpreted as cautiousness on your part. [...] In his own way at that time (underlined), he picked up the habit of checking happy spontaneity, and he felt you were accusing if he displayed it, and in small ways began blocking. Later he himself did not trust any good development, and so felt unsure in expressing it. He also interpreted a habit of “natural secrecy” (in quotes) on your part quite literally. [...] So it is important that he begin showing himself that he can run, and now he knows that you will heartily approve. [...]

He also blocks impulses to eat during the day, or sometimes before bed. He does not do this at meals, but the small snacks that he would ordinarily want, he does not take. He has not been tying to run, as I specified. This is important, for to him running is a happy, spontaneous activity, and he has blocked the impulse at times rather consciously because he feared he could not do it, that it would hurt or that he would look silly.

Now I tell you that he has been checking such impulses a good fifty times a day, this including impulses of which he has not been consciously aware. He is ready now to become aware of these. [...] He must obviously make an attempt to accept them, and that at least is a step in the proper direction. What he is becoming aware of clearly and consciously is the residue, the checks and balances, that he has been using to restrict physical activity.

These activities also open up nerve sources and make more energy available to him, because he is not using so much energy in blockages. He quite surprised himself this evening, and there are more surprises to come. [...] He is simply to write even if he only produces five pages that he does not use, or that he ends up throwing away.

This is bootleg material, so have him see how may times he can sit on the john, rather than have it that he must always do so every time, or not try at all. It is not a crisis if he tries a different pair of shoes and feels uncomfortable. [...] It is important that he go with you shopping, as he has, but also that he walk outside even if he begins very slowly. If he cannot go around the block to start with, he feels despondent, but the habit of walking will grow as he gives it a chance.

Today he was afraid, for one thing, that if he left himself alone he would just write poetry that very well might not sell. He feels he is his own employer, and as an employer must see that he produces salable work. Creatively however he wants to go full blast regardless, and that is the way of course that he produces his best “work.”

If he thinks in terms of doing what he wants to do, even if he assigns time to the pursuits, he is better off than labeling anything work. Out-of-bodies, writing and spontaneous impressions are all things he likes to do, but some fell inside his work category and some did not. He likes challenges. [...] But do not overdo it, as is his inclination at times when he thinks in terms of absolutes.

[...] But avoid suggestions like “I can astonish myself,” etc., of which he is so fond. I personally suggest, although he can do as he wishes, that he see himself rising at a decent hour to enjoy his day, and that he try two out-of-bodies a week during the day, as he used to. He is improving, however. [...]

In the face of this he threw even greater determination into his work and his “success” (in quotes), to make up for what he felt as other deficiencies. [...] Blame was projected by him upon other areas, because only when he allowed his thoughts to really surface would he blame you in any way. And when he did he felt guilty because he knew that you did (underlined) love him.

[...] He kept trying to get your attention with the symptoms while using them to protect himself at the same time, unless he saw signs of the particular warmth and acceptance he needed. He felt he could not afford to let the symptoms go unless he was willing to give you up entirely, and he would not do that.

He felt that for all your talk you wanted him to discipline spontaneity in a way basically impossible for him, that to release it in physical terms would mean two dangers: You would find him unbearable; and his sexuality released, would then demand fulfillment. He feared he would look elsewhere. You schooled yourself not to display emotion of a warm, spontaneous, happy nature, and he needs that kind of display.

[...] On the other hand he almost would have settled for the words. [...] Where you two had been emotionally allied, he felt you were on the other side. As he must watch himself before the world, he must watch himself before you.

Remembering your past ideas toward Prentice, he wondered, regardless of what you said, if you thought he should stay with them. He was very afraid of losing a contract with Prentice for Aspects, and a Bantam contract, while waiting around for another arrangement. At the same time he was afraid of making demands at Prentice for fear he would discover that they didn’t care if he stayed or not. Feeling that way he still went ahead on his own, and felt happily vindicated. The whole affair, with his reactions now, still had him at the point where he did not think he could physically recover, and he was caught in a panic that he tried to hide from you.

He made the bed that day. Usually he would think of how slow and clumsy he was, and if you were waiting or watching how impatient you might be. That day, he thought “After Rob seeing how I really am in the morning—if he saw me now he would see how much better I am,” and he felt proud of doing what he was doing as well as he could.

[...] When you saw him try to get up he knew you loved him, but the frown was what he saw. He was always trying to hide from you. Part of it was his projection because he felt you thought he was so stupid for having anything wrong at all, so the more he saw you frown the stupider he felt, and the more guilty. And the more he tried to hide his condition.

Yet for the entire time he began to wonder, regardless, about his position at Prentice. Was he being taken for a fool? Should he have changed to another publisher? But this meant in his case: should he try to exclusively be the literary person again? Yet he found that these people wanted his psychic work most of all. And that while they appreciated his other work, his main value in their eyes lay precisely in the field that he thought would mean nothing to them.

As mentioned before, he was told to slow down, told he would burn himself out before he was twenty. He climbed through belief systems with an unerring sense of direction, but as he toppled one there was always another. When he finished with the Catholic church, for example, he was certain that the secular, academic world offered the answers to the questions ignored, he felt, by religion. [...]

(9:58.) For a while, though he would not admit it, he felt that he would be welcomed with open arms by someone, meaning some system. The spiritualists, he found, would do so, and made overtures. [...] All he had to do was translate his experience into their terms, as before he felt he was expected to translate it into conventional religious, academic, or scientific terms.

Ruburt felt that anyone who went outside the established systems would meet ridicule, so he protected himself against it. He did his thing, but he set about creating an environment of “safety,” and he would not go outside of it. He would not have to deal with so-called skeptics on the one hand, nor would he allow himself to be set up as an occult priestess on the other. Nor would he be an object of ridicule to neighbors, for they would not see him that much.

Ruburt felt that he needed protection. He also felt he had to discipline himself because he could not trust himself, and his symptoms served, again, to keep him at his work. [...] Ruburt was also tinged by those concepts, so if he had to make a choice, he chose the writer’s cramp.

—then you should see some fairly immediate improvement when he realizes these steps will be taken. He has frozen up out of fear. The actions that he has taken he has not approved of. Those he wanted to take seemed, for inner or outer reasons, forbidden, and in frustration he adopted the symptoms. [...]

[...] What he accepted as a temporary condition he fears to be a permanent one—that is, the temporary positions. He expected more. Unfortunately he then projected a present situation into the future, which to some extent, resulted in a lack of mobility; the present conditions then seen as continuing indefinitely.

The hand symptoms also have to do with a feeling that he has not come to grips with reality. He wants the chance to do so in his own way, although he realizes his way may not, you see, pan out financially. He wants to try.

The symptoms became aggravated again after he signed up for next year’s work schedule at nursery school. Consciously he was pleased. Unconsciously, this verified his fear, that next year also he would make no money writing. He was pleased with the raise on a conscious level, but felt it blood money.

[...] When these were released, when he left the initial environment, he ran willy-nilly, he felt. He tended to be ruled more than he would prefer by emotionalism. (Pause.) At this point he began to rely upon you somewhat as a controlling factor, since he felt you were more given to reason and control. When you became ill, he realized that no other human being could be used in such a way.

He also felt it would help him understand to some extent his mother’s actions, and rid him of the hatred he had of her. [...] The problem as he set it in the framework he made for it, was quite literally huge. He also wanted to understand the effect of mind on matter. He did not really believe, intellectually, what I told him, that you form your own reality, and he felt that the symptoms would also help. He did not get his symptoms to test my theories, understand. [...]

[...] He did not count upon the body’s response. He was terrified of the vulnerability to pain, and yet he felt the ability to face and handle the pain was something he would run away from otherwise; that he had done everything to avoid it, and that it was one of life’s physical realities that he had refused to admit. So he felt a taste of it would not hurt him.

[...] He was quite appalled at the conditions once he had set them up. He did not realize until he went through it, how this kind of strain reacts on the body. When he began to realize this the inner plan had already been put into effect, and at the time of worst symptoms he literally could not withdraw quickly. [...]

In such cases, however, and with your understanding, he should feel free to call on you, regardless of what you are doing. [...] His mood was so bad because he felt that he could not win no matter what he did. If he had written instead, he thought, then he would have been denying the body impulses. The “error” was simply a result of a series of such denied impulses, that he then let loose at once. [...]

He thought he should write, and he wanted to. [...] He decided to do that, but felt guilty. He then swept the kitchen, because the body wanted the motion, and so did he.

(Pause at 11:58.) He did well at the dentist’s. Your attitude was of help. [...] You will have to face together certain important issues when he feels well enough so that he actively wants to go in stores. [...] That is, he is not to be writing then or anything else. [...] He need not try to do more. In fact, he should not, for I want him to have a simple feeling of achievement. [...]

Lunch, and he took his shower—something else he had put off doing. Before that, however, he purposefully decided to exercise—hence the stairway. [...] He punished himself for not writing by making the performance very difficult. [...] They were beginning to come into greater activity, but the leg was not ready to bear the full weight he had to put upon it for the top stair.

For some time, subjectively, he was in a highly ambiguous position. He felt he could expect no comfort from you, that he must face both your fears and his alone. Superstitiously he felt that in hiding fears about your parents he hid them for you both—shoved them under the psychological rug; but the rug became heavier and heavier.

He feels trapped in this apartment, that he is here because he is readily accessible to help your mother, as when he was a child he was readily accessible to help his own mother. He has a strong, affectionate, open nature that was dealt some harm. [...]

[...] He felt that any success of his that was not matched by you pulled you down in your parents’ eyes, and was therefore part victory and part defeat. He did fear that you would become bitter if you did not succeed (as a painter), and he sometimes felt that you retreated to the studio away from him, as purposely your father retreated from your mother into the cellar or garage. He would rather have burned anything that you have rather than store it in your family’s house. [...] He mentioned it on several occasions, but you made a reasonable reply having to do with convenience, and so he brooded.

He was not emotionally aware of this. [...] He had tuned himself toward fears, and these are what he picked up most frequently. [...] He does need encouragement now. [...] The more pliant bodily response in your intimate affairs shows that he is trusting you again as he had not done for some time to that degree.

He is afraid of hurting people by upturning their views. At times he was told he would come to no good if he continued with independent thinking. Intellectually he did continue. He is frightened of setting up a new religion, afraid. [...]

[...] But Ruburt insists that he intellectually and intuitively understand each point, and agree with it, or it puts him in the position of publicizing ideas when he is not a hundred percent certain of their validity, and he considers this to some degree dishonest. If he is wrong and people follow him, where is he leading them?

So sometimes you see in such periods he will put off sessions. [...] He stands behind the idea, you see. He is afraid of being attacked, or he is afraid of the work being attacked, for that kind of reason, as his poetry was.

Once he became convinced of the validity of the psychic experience, and his abilities, then all playful attitudes deserted him. He grasped at it tenaciously, and added it to the then unchallenged work to which he had, until then, devoted his main attention.

The whole thing boils down to the fact that he thought and felt you would not help him, but demand that he use his own abilities and help himself independently of you. You held his arm once as he crossed a busy street, in, I believe, Cobbleskill, and he never forgot it. [...] Don’t you see that car,” when he simply could not turn that quickly, and was terrified. There were other occasions when you held his arm and helped him and he remembers each one.

To tell Ruburt he has a responsibility to go out is a new idea. Instead, reignite the normal spontaneous desires he had to go out, despite the responsibility he felt he had to stay in. He always felt guilty taking a sunbath, for instance.

Ruburt must see that the more he does physically the more physically agile he will become. His physical reassurance is necessary—that is, he needs to be reassured that physically he can improve, and perform.

[...] He did not choose for example a way of action, even physically, that would go against your style of life or ideas, but cleverly wove these into ideas you both initially deeply believed in. when you were working particularly at Artistic, you could not say he was out gadding around and not using his abilities. There he was in his chair. He could not leave it.

In his own way Ruburt has used symptoms as what he considered a safe framework in which to explore those areas he wanted to explore. While he experienced you, as given much earlier in the sessions, as cautionary and repressive, then he did not need the symptoms. He trusted you to set safe bounds on his spontaneity. This, he felt, relieved him of that “responsibility.”

He was bound and determined to explore the nature of reality. He wanted to protect himself against self-delusion, of going too fast too soon, until he had enough knowledge to know what he was doing. He trusted most of my material, but he could not entirely trust me because I was part of the trip.

You believed in them so strongly that he felt he must himself exert those disciplinary tendencies that you earlier displayed for him. Indeed, as he became more aware of the little that is known, he wondered at his own daring. There was no one he could go to for instruction. [...]

When he saw that he could become a personality, and how willingly others would follow, he became aware of a new kind of responsibility. [...] He also began to see two poles in society—one highly conventional, closed, in which he would appear as a charlatan; and another, yearning but gullible, willing to believe anything if only it offered hope, in which his activities would be misinterpreted, and to him, fraudulent.

Frederick Fell has the book he wanted—the first one, and he will play it to the hilt, for him. [...] He thinks, Fell thinks, he is interested in the Seth material. He is playing around with it. He is afraid to take the plunge. He is afraid to say no also.

[...] He supposed he was being “good” in quotes, when he tried to follow the interpretation of others, and their idea of good. He felt inadequate, he felt two-faced only when he tried to squeeze the material into smaller molds that cannot hold it. [...]

He was outraged by A A, because he persisted in considering him as a “spirit”, in quotes, with all the connotations the word arouses in him. [...] He is not a personality fully developed in those larger terms of which I speak. He is a personality however, and he is not Ruburt’s.

I suggest that he let it go. He has not properly used the experiences that he has had. [...] He will do the sort of book he had in mind, but at a later date, and it will be a far better book.

He did not want to use his work (pause) to place his work, at the service of a cause to which he was not indelibly committed. (Long pause, eyes closed.) He has always been concerned with teaching, as I have been. [...] He must believe completely in what he is doing, in what he is teaching, or he feels himself deceitful.

He is strongly accusing toward anything he regards as religious deceit, because of his experience you see, with several priests in the past. [...] He is deeply committed to his idea of truth and goodness. When he could no longer believe in the tenets of the Catholic Church wholeheartedly, fervently and completely, he divorced himself from it as thoroughly as he had once embraced its tenets.

[...] He denied himself its use to anything like full capacity, for reasons given earlier, and also because he refused to use it rather than misuse it. He had to be more certain of our cause before he would allow himself to direct energy into it.

Ruburt does not mistrust himself because he plunges headlong, literally, into the poetic experience. He does not feel guilty because he does not intellectually question the moment of poetic revelation. He should therefore allow himself to plunge headlong with the same commitment into this experience.

[...] (Half humorously.) Now he thinks he should answer the phone every time it rings. [...] He thinks he is afraid to have people see him in poor shape, and so does not want to answer the door. [...] He does not want to see anyone, period, often at such times. He does not have to want to see people at all times.

Now when he was doing disguised autobiographical novels he released his fears through his writing. When the writing changed he buried them as completely as possible. He also stopped writing what he thought of as pessimistic poetry, which had performed the same function, allowing for the expression of fearful emotions. He used some of our material as an excuse to further shove his fears beneath, overexaggerating certain remarks that I had made. [...]

Now in class you see he is expressive and expansive. He enjoys teaching. In class he is spontaneous. He is also thinking of others and how to help them, and he is definitely not concentrating upon his own symptoms.

When he is in error he sees himself as an old hag, overly cautious with his psychic work, knocks himself over the head for not being freer about it, distrusts it, knocks himself over the head for distrusting it, fearful of emotional expression. Now you missed this fear of emotional expression on his part, because even with it he relates well usually with others. Particularly of course he was afraid of unpleasant emotional expression, or anger.

[...] They kept him writing, cut out distractions while he was learning. They also kept him from what he considered spiritual betrayals: he would not be a television personality, using his great powers of persuasion, until he knew what he was persuading people to do. At the same time he would be cutting out “temptations” to fritter away time, or to become a Kathryn Kuhlman. In his terms he felt alone, in that he felt he was upsetting all known knowledge, and without training working in the unknown. Since I was a part of that unknown, he could only trust me so far.

The very fact that he realizes such fears and faces them is automatically releasing. He does trust me now. It is when he is on his own, so to speak, that he is worried. He does not have to be on his own, however. [...]

[...] The psychic abilities are a basic part of his personality—bound to show themselves, as he was determined to express and use them. He has a fine intelligence. [...] The superstitions, horrendous beliefs and so forth, came to him through letters, and through the reading he began after his initial experience. These convinced him that utmost caution must be used as he advanced.

[...] He is indeed going in relatively unexplored realms. [...] He has been dealing in many levels at once. In one he had to “prove” his mental stability, to his way of thinking. Since he is spontaneous, to him that meant appearing instead always calm, reasonable. [...]

[...] He made his bed, he would lie in it. [...] Only when the body objected and went over those boundaries did he become frightened, for he saw then that he lacked the control over the body he thought he held. He could not silence all of its objections.

He did this quite wholeheartedly, and with a vengeance. He would not have an ordinary job. He would force himself into a position where he must indeed make good through his work, financially and otherwise. He tried to emulate what he thought your actions would be in the same circumstances at the time this began.

He often hid from fellow students out of shyness and fear of confronting them. He would hide in his poetry. [...] He had no great faith in the body because he saw how his mother’s behaved, without any knowledge of the reasons. [...] He did not trust it. He trusted his mind, so the idea of retreating from the body into the mind was quite logical to him when this began. [...]

[...] He leaped over that barrier, and when you thought you had given him the opportunity to be free, he was not about to misuse it. He would force himself to devote all his energies in that direction, to silence for example any stray temptations to go out into the yard in working time, to visit friends. He would see to it that he could not give in to such temptations.

[...] When the system was set up, for many reasons having to do with relative youth and lack of experience, he did not have any confidence in his conscious ability to say no, to hold to a “line of attack.” He was afraid he would be swept willy-nilly. He was also afraid, particularly when he tried teaching, that he might be led to give up and settle for another occupation that would bring automatic respectability, money, and some prestige.

The paper written today should be discussed by both of you so that those ideas are brought completely into the open where he can consciously and intellectually examine them. [...] For many reasons then he was convinced that his course was correct. His methods began to alarm him, but even when they did, and he realized that he was making a bargain of a sort, he still believed in the premise that made a bargain necessary.

Finally it came to that, where earlier he believed he could reverse the process. Now he is at the point where he is beginning to believe he can indeed reverse the process. [...]

[...] Sound to him does not have the same meaning, though he may dislike the noise. He interprets your remarks therefore as aimed against distractions in general, recognizing your symbolism, and this makes him uneasy because in his own life he has taken the steps he has to cut down distractions.