“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is no one with a great talent who does not use it, for the drive is comparable to the talent, and the whole personality knows about it as the flower knows about blossoms. The writer cannot grow at the expense of the person, for the writer springs out of the person, and not the other way around. The person is a writer. There can be no writer without a person. An artist is free to use his ability as far as his person is free. The writer cannot survive without the survival of the person. The writer’s or the artist’s intuitions, sensibilities, inspirations come through his person, through his experiences and temperament. There are no divisions. There is one self.

The same can often apply to those with strong abilities in any field. Now. Early, some divisions occurred when Ruburt picked up the idea that womanhood was no help in being a writer, so certain aspects of the self were watched. In later years however, and partially as a result of the relationship between the two of you, and your joint ideas, Ruburt became worried that he would not do his thing as a writer. All other portions of the self were pared down so that the writer, he thought, could function better.

Now. First, as Ruburt surmised today, he did not earlier understand the statement, “there are no divisions to the self,” on an emotional level, or apply it in that way to himself. Instead, “the writer” was seen in his mind as the dominant part of the self, definitely apart from other portions, and with different goals and purposes.

[...] That recognition in a fashion comes from several fronts—from people in all walks of life, from professors, members of different professions rather—than specifically from other writers (pause), and in time that situation itself will improve. It is the public image as he thinks he has as a psychic that bothers him, more than the one he feels is lacking as a writer. [...]

[...] Yet she’d found this deep yearning snatched away with the advent of her psychic abilities—goodbye to all of those accepted reviews, the critical success, even the money, that would go along with the conventional acceptable public image of the successful writer of good quality poetry and/or fiction. [...]

[...] It was as if he were considered a writer no longer, or as if the writing itself, while considered good enough, was also considered quite beside the point—of secondary concern, and in the psychic field the very word “creative” often has suspicious connotations. [...]

Ruburt saw himself as a writer, and judged himself through that focus, and other accomplishments that did not rigidly adhere to that focus were not considered successes, or even were jealously regarded as detriments. [...]

I suggest you read the session I gave concerning the importance of the person from which the artist or writer springs. [...]

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.

[...] The sportsman, the writer or the artist—any of them would utilize that background differently, but well, and in such a way that it was particularly suited.

[...] The writing self became latent as the sportsman did, yet the writer self and the artist were closely bound. [...]

[...] Because of your joint ideas—you, the artist, Ruburt the writer—then your financial contribution was strictly limited by both of you to that one field.

[...] Because he considered himself a writer, and because he considered a writer something different from a woman, it was difficult for him to realize that he was both.

Childbirth might fulfill a woman and destroy a writer. [...]

[...] In 1957, after Jane had sold her first few short stories, she was invited to a conference of science fiction writers at Milford, Pennsylvania. I couldn’t go because of my own work, so Jane attended the conference with Cyril Kornbluth [now deceased], a friend and a well-known writer who lived near our home in Sayre, Pennsylvania.

[...] Out of this episode — which we did not understand was a trance for several years afterward — evolved a group of writers, Jane among them, who called themselves “The Five.” [...] The four other writers in the group were much better known than Jane was.)

[...] At one time some years ago, at a writers’ conference, she became involved in circumstances that could have led to her psychic development before she was ready. [...]

(Late yesterday afternoon my pendulum told me that Jane’s symptoms stemmed from her feeling that she had failed to become a successful “straight” writer—a novelist, poet, essayist, et al.; that she felt she had failed as the serious writer she had always dreamed of becoming, that the psychic work represented a turning down a wrong path; that actually, basically, the psychic work represented failure to her rather than success. [...]

For some time Ruburt felt he was a failure, as a wife and as a writer. [...] It was quite all right for the aspiring writer. [...]

(I was quite surprised the other day when Jane told me that our two apartments were okay to her if she was a writer, but not all right for a psychic—especially one who was becoming well known and was visited by all kinds of people, etc. [...]

As a rule, psychics are not particularly good writers. He tries to view his own work through some idealized image of a psyche who is as gifted as he is as a writer, and also highly gifted in meeting the public, putting on performances, acting as a healer, as a prophet, and as an expert therapist all at once, and in so doing his own characteristics and natural abilities and inclinations become lost along the way. [...]

He may think of some hypothetical literary writer—a composite image again, comfortable enough, slightly avant-garde, fashionably so, in contact with his peers, quite forgetting again that his—and his mind has always been far less conventional than that, far more probing and again, forgetting that he always enjoyed viewing society from a vantage point slightly outside of it. [...]

The books themselves show that he is more than fulfilling his promise as a writer, both in scope and artistry. [...]

[...] We think that both writers express extreme points of view, and that both are much too adulatory of us. [...] The writer of the other letter, while praising our work, is caught up in questions of conventional religion: “I keep wondering over and over again whether Seth is a demon or a deception. [...]

[...] I could sympathize with their writers, though, for each one had communicated with us out of a deep need, and is searching for insight into the creation of a personal and mass reality. [...]

[...] Being a writer would give him status even if he did not make money, though he hoped to.

[...] The writing abilities were always one manifestation of his own strong psychic nature, however, and his growth as a personality required the merging of both if even the writer was to succeed. [...]

[...] The very intuitive feelings behind the writer image were based upon the mysticism of nature, the joy of creaturehood; and yet pursued with too much literal-mindedness, the determination to write, once equated with work, led to important denials in those precise areas.

[...] Thinking in terms of the conventional world, however, you feel sometimes at a loss, for you want to say, “What am I?” in those terms (underlined)—an artist, or a writer, or a combination of the two? Ruburt wonders, what is he—a writer, a psychic, a combination of the two? [...]

If you were just a writer or just an artist, or if Ruburt were just a writer or just a psychic, then neither of you would be involved in this endeavor, which is even in your terms, of such a creative nature that it defies definitions. [...]

(“The pendulum repeated my insight of a couple of days ago—one that may be very important: that all of my upsets over the years, the stomach, the side, the groin, the shoulder—the whole bunch—stem from my consistent feeling that I’m a failure in life, that I don’t contribute enough, that I don’t help Jane enough, that I haven’t really made it as an artist or as a writer.

[...] The previous beliefs in himself as a writer, however, clashed with these new urges because he did not consider anything but fiction as the work of a writer, except for poetry.

[...] He built his life around the core belief in himself as a writer.

His core belief in himself as a writer, he saw, was really highly constrictive. [...]

(Lewis Carroll [pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] 1832-98; English writer and mathematician; author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

[...] Even relationships would make no difference—and Ruburt in his way made the same judgments about the “writer.” [...]

[...] Add to that list the belief that the great artist or writer concentrates upon his or her art so intensely and single-mindedly, and single-heartedly, that the focus itself forces the artist or poet to use those abilities to their utmost, or that great genius demands one-sided vision and a denial of the world. [...]

Now: In the same way you could not, practically speaking, experience such other-consciousness (with a hyphen) unless you learned to stand somewhat aside, like the writer in Ruburt’s remarks. [...]

[...] You would just have another expansion of consciousness, another self-who-is-aware-of-being in the same way that — using an analogy, granted — the writer is aware of the self who lives, in those terms; is the self who lives while being in a position of some apartness, able to comment upon the life being lived.

[...] Both are professional writers, and their experiences with double dreams were relayed to me by Tam Mossman, Jane’s editor.

[...] (Pause.) You create lives for yourselves, changing them as you go along, as a writer might change a book, altering the circumstances, changing the plots. The writer only knows that he or she creates without understanding the spontaneous order with which the creativity happens. [...]

[...] It’s as if, at usual levels, you tried to be a doctor instead of a writer. [...]

[...] I haven’t said anything about being a writer… they might figure I don’t need the work… think that it’s full-time though and briefly wonder how I could handle that with writing.

[...] what Eddie wanted were answers to those weighty problems, and I come up with switch plots, that any other writer could do... [...]

(Pause.) The two of you thought of yourselves specifically as a writer—or rather a poet—and an artist before our sessions began. [...]

[...] It seemed at different times since our sessions began that there were disruptive conflicts, for example: was Ruburt a writer or was he a psychic? [...]

[...] I can quite literally be called a ghost writer, though I do not approve of the term “ghost.” [...]

If a writer can qualify as any kind of authority on the basis of age, therefore, then I should get a medal. [...]

[...] Before I end this session I ask you to imagine our setting, for Ruburt has told me that a writer must be careful to set the scene. [...]