“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The confident inner self will let the ego manipulate in the physical world, but will not allow it to become fiercely overprotective. Your work contains the strength of your inner self in many ways. Your particular ego’s function is to show this work to the world as you know it. I hesitate, and I mean this, to offer practical advice to one who tries to be so practical. But my dear Joseph, there is no true practicality in smothering your abilities by working in a position where you cannot use your abilities. You will not be paid for abilities you cannot use, since I know you must think in financial terms. Your ego’s job is to help you trade your true abilities for your daily bread.

You may take a break. If you do not mind, after the break I will continue for a short while. I am trying very hard, Joseph, because dissociation will answer more than one of your particular problems, and practical ones at that. Associations which you may consider impractical are often very practical. I always feel when I speak along these lines as if I must say over and over that I do not intend any shortening of your working hours, only that you have more energy than you realize and that associations, as certainly you must see with your landlord, are often practical. Take your break.

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.

(The Mr. Burrell referred to here was Jane’s employer, the manager of a supermarket in Marathon where Jane worked for a few weeks as a cashier. It was a job she hated.)

(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.

Your father somewhat resented your seemingly magical projections of reality into paintings, since he worked futilely in the realm of material inventions and got nowhere. He also, to a much greater degree than you, never trusted his instincts, although they were very strong. Your mother had much to do with this and so did his own mother.