“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(To Sissy.) I will not bawl you out the first night. It is against my principles, and do not be surprised that I called Ruburt a puritan for he is, a strange mixture of a complete primitive and a complete puritan, and if it were not for me he would be very solemn-faced, indeed.

Now, if there ever was a puritan remark it was the one that just escaped our friend, Ruburt’s lips, for in his mind still, you see, you must have this purpose and be active and it is wrong to simply go back to bed for no better reason than that you want to go back to bed.

(To Florence.) The Lady of Florence is the complete puritan and that part of Ruburt can relate, you see. You have not made the primitive part yet.

[...] I am (underlined) generalizing here to make a point: a largely postcard land, in which social clichés pass for communication, in which social ceremonies take the place of private communications—a land in which beliefs must be like landmarks, unchanging, utterly dependable, always there to be used for touchstones lest the puritanical Protestant stray from worthy goals. [...]

There is a long history connected with such American Puritan beliefs about morality, having to do with the fact that medieval priests were sometimes licentious, and opulent. [...]

[...] Telling him to eat without understanding your own emotional attitude is useless, for he picks up and exaggerates the Puritan-like feelings toward food. [...]

[...] You did not have, in the past life, any idea of joy connected with religion, however, the cross being then a symbol of death, leading to a Puritan afterlife.

[...] These qualities directly in opposition to the overly restrictive, puritan rigidities that he was in the past heir to.

[...] The ideas of thrift and the puritan attitudes were not the result of the Depression, but helped cause it.

[...] And forgive a bit of gentle—gentle—sarcasm, but to your puritan American soul, art for its own sake, or contemplation, still somehow goes against the grain. [...]

[...] These emerge from the old Puritan work ethic: “The devil finds evil work for idle hands.”

[...] Even clothes began to become less colorful, as for example in the Puritan’s straight garb. [...]

[...] It is instead a fanatical Puritan vein, peculiarly American in character, and restrictive rather than expansive, for the bursts of emotion are highly structured — that is, the emotions are limited in most areas of life, permitted only an explosive religious expression under certain conditions, when they are not so much spontaneously expressed as suddenly released from the dam of usual repression.

Your mother sat in the dream before a higher bar, symbolizing your own inner conviction, based on early rather puritanical bases, that your mother and her actions should be judged, and a child’s natural but unfortunate vindictiveness: “She who has hurt me, particularly if my mother and a female, shall meet justice.” [...]