“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Man’s ego causes him to interpret everything else in the light of himself. He loses very much in this manner. The ego is definitely an advancement, but it can be compared to the bark of the tree in many ways. The bark of the tree is flexible, extremely vibrant, and grows with the growth beneath. It is a tree’s contact with the outer world, the tree’s interpreter, and to some degree the tree’s companion.

Your work is improving and will improve constantly. It may seem, or it did seem, unreasonable to you that personality had much to do with so-called advancement in the artistic world. And yet people sense your attitude toward them very strongly.

She would have talked the landlord into taking one week’s rent instead of two months’ rent in advance. There is a supermarket three blocks away where she would have gotten a job that would have lasted seven months. At the end of this time you would have had a job in an advertising firm. You would have gotten by very well. You would not have stayed at the advertising firm over eighteen months. However Jane would have worked in an art gallery—this experience was ahead of her, not foreordained but ahead of her in any case. You would have ended up in the same gallery.

It was for this reason that Jane was antagonistic to Mr. Burrell from the beginning, and filled with panic. What set her off was not the disappointment over the teaching job, which fell through, but the sequence of events, such as Mr. Burrell’s advances and her subconscious knowledge of her father’s nature.

(Jane finally became unable to eat breakfast before going to work. She had cramps, and then her thyroid gland began to act up. I had never met her employer, but gradually understood that he had made advances by innuendo. I told Jane to stay home and went to the store and quit her job for her; by chance the manager was not there at the time.