“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt’s mother knew that the child could be taken away were it proven that she was an unfit mother in any way, or unable to give the child proper care. Well over a year before this picture was taken, in fact, Ruburt was sent to a Catholic home.⁵ There, unconventional thought was not tolerated. The inflexibility of dogma conscientiously applied to daily action was experienced, and within it Ruburt tried to apply himself and to focus his deeply mystical nature.*

He remembered his mother’s constant criticism of him, but barely recalls his scandalized disapproval of her swearing, for example, on his return home. He threw himself headlong into the Catholic reality, pursued it with great stubborn diligence, used it as a framework of conventionality in which he could allow his mystic nature to grow.

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.

The mystical went underground, reappearing as science fiction.⁶ Again, in the social and religious background of the child, unconventional mental or physical actions could bring penalties. For a while the child could interpret mystical experience within the church — but even then, there was always conflict with church authorities.

He leaped, however, from the framework of the church into another framework, one in which mysticism was experienced secondhand, under the guise of artistic production. Idea Construction⁷ literally shattered that framework.

(Pause.) For various reasons already given, concerning your joint relationship, and your own purposes (to me), it has taken some time for a newer, suitable framework to form itself — one in which Ruburt is free to pursue mystic experience in a practical structure; one in which unconventionality of thought is allowed to continue freely. He felt that this could outgrow the framework of his art, as it did that of the church. The physical symptoms⁸ served quite literally as a framework in which spontaneity was to some extent at least allowed a mental and psychic freedom, until he felt secure.

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.

In your terms, the intersection with probabilities occurred one day in an interview the child had with a priest. The event, in Ruburt’s terms, with its results in your probability, is mentioned in his Rich Bed (see Note 4). The child in seventh or eighth grade wrote a poem, expressing the desire to be a nun, and brought it to a parish priest. In your probability, the priest told the child that she was needed by her mother; but intuitively he saw that Ruburt’s mysticism would not fit into the church organization.

In the other probability, Ruburt’s desire at that time won. He managed to water down the extent and dimensions of his mysticism enough so that it was acceptable. In that other probability, there will be no long period of time in which the mystical experience would lie latent, and no necessity at all to put it into new terms.

The writing ability would follow as its handmaiden. In this world the artistic abilities were put first, but the mystical nature was given greater chances to expand and develop. And both were given the opportunity and the challenge of shattering old, historic frameworks, and of rising beyond them.

(Intently:) Ruburt here chose the writing structure, and has stuck to it as unswervingly as he once stuck to the church, yet always seeking a new framework. For a while he idealized you. Your guidance and strength were his framework. When it became apparent that you were also human, and not a framework, he became frightened. When you encouraged the emergence and expression of his mysticism, then you could no longer act, he felt, as a framework to contain it. By then it seemed to threaten the joint structure of your lives. He knew intuitively that you also used artistic creation as a buffer between yourself and mystical expression.

For all of the reasons given — and they are clearly given (in personal sessions) — he was afraid that spontaneity, mental or physical, would threaten the long-accepted framework of your joint lives. If he went spontaneously forward in mystical experience, then, given his ideas, it threatened the conventional acceptance of his art. Conventional ideas of art and writing, upon which the old framework, now, was dependent, no longer fit.

(11:05.) He had you to consider. This experience of his was taking time from your art as well as his own, to his way of thinking. At the same time, the mystical nature rejoiced at its opportunity, and sensed its potential. Ruburt was determined to go ahead (louder) — he was also determined to keep the old structures and to ignore the cracks in them. In part his loyalty to you was connected, and his responsibility as he saw it to keep you focused as an artist, and to let nothing distract you. Yet here he was distracting you.

For a while your joint communication system was shaky. He was afraid to go ahead. The symptoms kept him at his job, at home, and allowed him to concentrate without outside distractions; kept him writing, with mystical experience dutifully translated into art.

You see his joyful potential, and he knows that you do. Sometimes he feels lost, however, as an emotional human being, groping toward that potential, and he needs to be comforted. As you know now, comforting him can be frightening to you, because it returns you both to deep emotional realizations and feelings that you sublimate in your paintings, and even to mystical experiences that you also channel through your work.

Eventually Jane’s grandfather, Joseph Burdo, with whom she shared a deep mystical identification, was unable to support two extra people, and the family had to rely upon public assistance. Jane’s grandmother was killed in an automobile accident in 1936. The next year, her grandfather moved out of the house. By then Marie was partially incapacitated, and the Welfare Department began to furnish mother and daughter with occasional (and often unreliable) domestic help. Thus, Jane was 9 years old in 1938, when she changed schools after finishing the third grade.

6. It took more than a little while for Jane’s mystical nature to show itself in prose. Two years after we married, she published her first work of fiction, a short story about reincarnation called “The Red Wagon”: It appeared in the December, 1956, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [© 1956 by Fantasy House, Inc., New York, N.Y.]. She was 27 years old, and most pleased with the beginning of her professional career. Within the next several years she sold a number of additional stories to the same magazine, as well as two short novels, and also published poetry and a little fiction in other markets.

It’s taken us some years to understand that behind Jane’s symptoms lay her efforts to understand and express the very strong creative energy she’s sensed within herself since childhood. Yet the conflict that developed between her writing self and her mystical self, as explained by Seth in Personal Reality, was only one facet of her intuitive drive toward that expression: As Jane matured, she realized that there were other challenges for her to contend with too. Among them were the resolution of some old family relationships — and nowhere in this note am I talking about past lives or probable lives, but just the working out of hard questions rooted in this present physical reality. From Seth and ourselves we’ve accumulated much unpublished material about Jane’s symptoms and attendant matters. The bulk of it is often applicable to others, and eventually she may write a book about the whole subject. Should she do so, it would certainly be a history of one person’s long efforts to grapple as fully as possible — and not always successfully — with her own human qualities. But I also think that in many ways it would be her most illuminating work. She fully accepts the idea that she creates her own reality.