“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As mentioned, the far contact point is somewhat more manageable for you than for Ruburt, but affects you nevertheless. You do not dare allow your intuitions full reign even when you paint at such times for fear that they will carry up with them these repressed feelings.

The spontaneity is considered safe along certain lines, but these lines become narrowed, and the further the situation continues the more narrowed the area of spontaneity allowed in your work. In the past this has caused a tendency toward overreliance on technique. Do you follow me?

What neither of you sufficiently (underlined) understood was the strong interrelationship between your personal lives and your work. You were aware of it but you did not understand, generally speaking, that your relationship must be actively and positively enjoyable on a daily basis, if both of you are to produce the work that you want.

You were apt to put the personal relationship last, or rather to let it go, so that often it seemed to come after everything else. Now it is true that withheld sexual energy can be diverted to creative aims, but in your cases it was the feeling of daily emotional nourishment that was sometimes lacking.

Now. Several more points. Some rather simple, but they should be mentioned.

The early remarks by the young psychologist had thoroughly frightened him, and he was not ready to go into the deeper implications. He was quite simply terrified. He felt also then that you would give or withhold physical love according to his performance on the tests. But as foolish as that sounds, you see, it was based on these roles that you both accepted.

In general Ruburt is more easily spontaneous, for example. Over the years you simply did not allow enough leeway for yourselves, but the overall tendencies are perfectly legitimate. They operate quite obviously, also in your relationship with the world at large. You can put up with noncontact comparatively speaking far better than Ruburt, and will be the first one to draw the line here. As in the other areas mentioned, the more personal ones.

Ruburt is apt to be more adjusting in that area, but here also you see, you have set certain unconscious points, boundaries on either side between what you consider too close contact, and too little. The tendencies operate in all areas, and they provide very constructive guidelines, and are beneficial when they are not carried to extremes, and when the focus is on maintaining the balance between. Because of your fears, both of you had your eyes out instead for the danger points.

In your contact physically with others these tendencies also apply. Ruburt will allow himself to be taken advantage of, for example, more easily than you in personal contacts. This outrages you because your symbolic danger point is brought into focus. It bothers him, but less.

This in itself has led you away from stereotyped portraits, and you could have fallen into that trap with your background in comics. There you see you avoided facing the ordinary human portrait through figures that were actually not as such individual, but types or even caricature. At that time in your development you were afraid of emotions in art to such a degree that you chose in comics to deal with stereotypes rather than individual characters, to follow rigid patterns.

(“Not now. I’m too tired to think of any, but I will later.”)