“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We had several questions for Seth, including the one noted at the end of the last session: Why didn’t the unconscious realize it was going too far in its protective role? [...]

(This afternoon Jane had a very revealing dream about the whole question of protection, the male aspects of her personality, etc.; a copy is attached to the session.

This is the same person who on the other hand used to put up barriers of bookcases at one end of the living room to protect himself from any neighbors or miscellaneous callers; who objected when Mr. Gottlieb dared to cross into his private working area and glance at a paper. [...]

[...] We haven’t seen the kind of physical response we want yet, and I wanted to know if our efforts were prompting the Sinful Self to step up its own protective behavior to keep Jane “under control.” [...]

[...] Ruburt is safe and protected. [...]

[...] I’m still shocked to realize that while I was laboring over Mass Events, and Jane was doing God of Jane, that those two books had stirred up even more resistance on the part of that personified Sinful Self, and that when they were finished we were then confronted with a new barrage of symptoms that ended up restricting [and protecting?] Jane’s physical manipulability even more. [...]

At times, Joseph, you have not trusted your ego’s ability to protect you. … You have forced it into anxiety so that it overcompensated, trying to protect you, and ended up half choking you to death. [...]

[...] The ego’s purpose is protective. [...]

If, for example, our tree bark grew fearful of stormy weather and began to harden itself against the elements, in a well-meaning but distorted protective spirit, then the tree would die. [...]

[...] We have instead a flexible bark, changing with the elements, protecting the inner tree (or inner self), but flexible, opening or closing in rhythmic motion. [...]

You had each thought, however, that there was something extremely uncomfortable about the truly creative person in society, that he or she had to protect himself or herself, and the symptoms have been Ruburt’s way of protecting himself—yet also his way of saying, “I am different. [...] When the opinions of others are no longer so valued, there is no need for such protection, such playing dead.

[...] You do not need to protect yourselves against the world. [...]

[...] You (pointing to me) do not believe that nature is hostile, nor does Ruburt, but you both accept the concept that there are hostile elements against which you must protect yourselves, and that the artist or writer, or any sensitive wise person is at a great disadvantage against a system in which he is born, and that he is to some extent at its mercy.

Ruburt felt that anyone who went outside the established systems would meet ridicule, so he protected himself against it. [...]

Ruburt felt that he needed protection. [...]

[...] In the past, the long past, he discouraged your sexual gallantry in his concern for proving himself independent—and also, then, because he felt on the other hand that if he endorsed it you would feel that he was tacitly demanding conventional female protection. [...]

[...] After that, Ruburt felt that he must protect his ability, guarding it against the world, and even against any other tendencies that he felt might run counter to his ability. [...]

He wanted to protect himself against the “artistic temperament” as it is conventionally understood. [...]

(To Mack.) First of all, you are protecting the inner self very well and you have a protective attitude toward it which is good. [...]

Consciousness has its built-in protection. [...]

[...] Say, “I feel this way and I must express it at this time or be honest, but he has his protection from my feelings. [...]

[...] (Long pause.) You will have to protect your privacy, simply because you are the kind of people you are. [...]

Your feelings, however, are based upon personal and cultural background—the unsafe universe, in which inspiration must be guarded and protected. It is seen as basically so weak that it requires an artillery of attitudes and a fortress of concepts to protect it. [...]

Then the joy of the ideal itself is marred for you, and you become over-protective. [...]

Sex became dangerous—not to protect your persons—which would be delighted, but to protect your rigid, limited ideas of your “artistic selves”—the writer and the artist might be threatened, and so your personal lives must suffer, and the persons be shoved away.

You each produced despite your individual and joint efforts to inhibit other areas of your life; to protect a limited, old idea of what an artist and a writer are. [...]

[...] With his literal mind Ruburt took protection against it, and found in your apartment and home what he hoped would be a safe sanctuary in monastic terms, where each of you could learn and grow. [...] Your protections have been against the social world, but in the extremes you end up losing an important part of the natural world as well.

[...] To some extent you felt, both of you, that a woman, gifted, needed greater protection. [...]

If you really do understand that you live in a safe universe, you need no such protection. [...]

When civilized children are medically inoculated against such diseases, however, they usually do not show the same symptoms, and to an important extent the natural protective processes are impeded. Such children may not come down with the disease against which they are medically protected, then — but they may indeed therefore become “prey” to other diseases later in life that would not otherwise have occurred.

(Bill Gallagher doubted that warships were used by merchantmen but Seth told us this was common in those days; all ships had to be armed anyhow as a protection against piracy. [...]

[...] Lemons were used in those days as a protection against scurvy.

He kept it to protect himself and to protect you, artistically and economically, so that for example you would not have a child to support or to turn you from your lone purpose. [...]

He protected himself against early marriage or child bearing by identifying the male writer to some extent with his own writing image. [...]

[...] I still wanted to know why that portion of the personality was so blind to the harm it was wreaking—why it didn’t understand even in its own terms that its devastation was threatening greatly the very security and protection it has said it wanted. [...]

[...] Since the implications here might involve success, I said as we talked, perhaps that too had alerted the sinful self to become more protective, although her current state had begun hours before I suggested the call. [...]

[...] You are both able to deal with the situation, however—and remember that the great creative forces of your body and mind are actively protecting you even when you are perhaps most concerned. [...]

[...] Now Ruburt’s ego had been hit over the head, so to speak, so many times in his childhood that it became very sensitive, developing a rigidity out of self-protection.

(“Concerning episodes like those with Elmira College, and the monks and the monastery: How come Jane doesn’t take steps to protect herself in advance from such implications?”)

[...] I suggested a pattern of protective measures we could take. [...]

[...] In actuality, however, most of you believe — and experience — a far different picture, in which the body must be protected at all costs from a natural leaning toward disease and poor health. Viruses must be warded off, as if you had no protection against them. [...]

At my age (63), then, I’m learning once again that I can’t live Jane’s life for her, or protect her from the motivations of her own physical and psychic explorations and choices, no matter how much I may want to. [...] Jane’s determination would see to her own protection in any case. [...] I deeply believe that her psyche would insist that she doesn’t need any sort of basic protection by me (or anyone else) to begin with—only understanding. [...]

[...] It’s easy to see how, in Jane’s case at least, the church’s teachings about sin began to grow as the innocent child started protecting her spontaneous natural mysticism—that prime attribute she’d chosen for exploration in this life. I don’t think her “sinful self” could have risen to such prominence without feeding upon those repressions, clamping down more and more within the psyche as the years passed, continuing its misguided but “well-meaning attempt to protect the creative self … to keep a hand of caution on its course lest the centuries of men’s belief in sin carried a true weight that I shared but could not comprehend.” [...]

[...] “It’s got to do with understanding that one must protect or encourage personal integrity before anything else,” I said, “even if it means projecting one’s troubles out onto an entity like Prentice, the church, or whatever. [...]

(Long pause.) In that regard his symptoms developed more along the lines of exerting caution rather than, say, seeking protection. [...]

[...] In a fashion they served as regulators that he felt at one time allowed him to live on an even course, tempering spontaneity or psychic exploration lest it progress too quickly for him to follow, yet also protecting him from other distractions so that he could continue his explorations. [...]

[...] In your society money is like a weapon that you need to protect yourself. [...]

[...] But he also needed your help, because while the main method was his, your intents were in unison and the same—to protect yourselves and your creativity from an unsafe universe. [...]

[...] And because you still seem to believe that your universe is unsafe, all of your creativity must give you the weapon—money—to protect you against the inequities and uncertainties of “fate.”