“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Creative people, if they succeed at all, often find themselves in a position where they feel that the precious inward isolation is threatened. Demands are then made by the outside world that were not made earlier. The inward work ends up causing them to relate to a physical world when they believed that their duty was to shut themselves off from that world.

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. Your emotions follow your beliefs. 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.

Because many of his ideas and beliefs were also bound up with you, your work, your ideas and his interpretations of them, then your relationship became entwined. Initially the beliefs were accepted because he had been taught to believe to fear his energy. On the other hand it was his pride. Now in another kind of life-style, with another kind of personality, the same belief might have been dispensed with easily. If energy flows in conventional accepted patterns it is not feared.

With the dream book he tried to do something he did not consider artistic, and was unable to do it. He believed in the book’s ideas, but the artistic framework for him was not right. When it was rejected my book was developing. Finances were mixed up with freedom to write, then.

Give us time.... He had schooled himself to believe that distractions of any kind had to be eliminated. This means that in writing a book he withdrew, and more and more, physically speaking. It was his idea of training. The issues were also operating between you, as his paper on belief indicates.

The reason that he could not get rid of the symptoms was simply that he believed them necessary requirements to his work. The symptoms and curtailment of activities were invisibly combined, so that he did not realize you could consciously set up a system in which you could work freely without distractions, and be perfectly free to do whatever else you wanted otherwise.

Now. In one respect Ruburt is quite correct: you believe it is safer to express your doubts and negative aspects then to express your enthusiasms or hopes.

If you did not know that Ruburt could indeed manage to dance, though not in the wildest fashion, then you would not believe it when “faced” with the reality of his behavior around the house. You would think he could not do it.

To let these ideas go was to let his youth go, and to admit that many of those ideas, believed in so strongly and so stubbornly, were not working any longer. Even your remarks about a black-haired wife meant the image of a woman in her 20’s—the-younger-than-you obviously youthful, spontaneous and cute wife; not a 44-year-old woman with experience behind her, some sense, and who could stand on her own feet, but a much younger version, youthful enough to get into trouble, and to be humorously watched in that regard.

When he thinks in such terms he sees an old woman, crippled and alone, incapacitated, in a home, and the fear brings a feeling of powerlessness, not one of strength. The beliefs mentioned added up to beliefs on a physical level so that Ruburt believed that his arms and legs could not straighten out, that he could not physically walk well.

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. The point of power is in the present. You must believe it, regardless of what has happened in the past, in your terms. This applies most personally. Improvements can begin and continue in this present. The ideas in Ruburt’s paper tonight are important.

Up until now Ruburt felt and believed that despite the unfortunate aspects you were willing to go along. He felt you were not willing on your own to face some issues on a conscious level, and as he grew more frightened he felt that you were willing to let him do this for both of you while you were accusing him because of the symptoms.

If instead you structure your attention upon each backsliding, minute as it might appear, then the improvements seem to become meaningless and less apparent, until they seem to disappear. You have your choice. I believe you have the information to put it to use—and if it does you any good to know it, and it should, I am highly optimistic.

(“I believed it was my duty to use my creative abilities each day, to concentrate fully there and to exclude everything else I could.”)