“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Remembering your past ideas toward Prentice, he wondered, regardless of what you said, if you thought he should stay with them. He was very afraid of losing a contract with Prentice for Aspects, and a Bantam contract, while waiting around for another arrangement. At the same time he was afraid of making demands at Prentice for fear he would discover that they didn’t care if he stayed or not. Feeling that way he still went ahead on his own, and felt happily vindicated. The whole affair, with his reactions now, still had him at the point where he did not think he could physically recover, and he was caught in a panic that he tried to hide from you.

He made the bed that day. Usually he would think of how slow and clumsy he was, and if you were waiting or watching how impatient you might be. That day, he thought “After Rob seeing how I really am in the morning—if he saw me now he would see how much better I am,” and he felt proud of doing what he was doing as well as he could.

[...] When you saw him try to get up he knew you loved him, but the frown was what he saw. He was always trying to hide from you. Part of it was his projection because he felt you thought he was so stupid for having anything wrong at all, so the more he saw you frown the stupider he felt, and the more guilty. And the more he tried to hide his condition.

Yet for the entire time he began to wonder, regardless, about his position at Prentice. Was he being taken for a fool? Should he have changed to another publisher? But this meant in his case: should he try to exclusively be the literary person again? Yet he found that these people wanted his psychic work most of all. And that while they appreciated his other work, his main value in their eyes lay precisely in the field that he thought would mean nothing to them.

[...] Now this is his projection, and one he only realized at break: he felt that any incomplete manuscripts were indications of a waste of time, and that you thought he should publish everything he wrote, and that an unpublished manuscript was a blot of sorts. You often mentioned Dreams for example, when he was only too willing to forget it. So he felt guilty about Rich Bed even though it wasn’t finished.

The morning episodes are directly related to the fact lately that he grew to doubt his ability to recover, and face each morning the prospect of a day in which he tried to hide those feelings from himself and from you. The hallway between the bedroom and the bath became, symbolically, the hallway to physical activity through which he was afraid he could not pass, and through whose portals he must go alone, since he did not want to burden you with his despondency over it.

[...] When Ruburt had outside jobs he used encounters with others to take up the slack that existed between his emotional nature and your own. When he worked at home the differences in your temperaments became more noticeable. He was also extremely concerned that he learn to discipline himself—now that he had an entire day, and to prove to you his appreciation of the fact that you were still working out.

He felt he did not know much, but that he knew more in ways important to him than these people did. They were coming to him when he so desperately had wanted to join them, thinking that his idealized, youthful hopes would there find fruition.

As he discovered today when he looked into a mirror, he was comparing his image now to what it had been several years ago literally—not only in terms of symptoms, you see. In an odd way he also thought, because of that, that you were constantly comparing him now with a 5-or-10-year earlier self.

[...] That was what he was afraid of in the light of your perfectionist tendencies. In a strange way he was relieved; seeing what he has been trying to hide, he feels, will give the both of you a basis from which you can operate, in which any improvements are appreciated.