“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When the two of you could work together, he thought, all that would change. You would have time to work and play. You would be more emotionally demonstrative, freed from your job. His work would bear more and more the burden of his needs, and take up the emotional slack that was now apparent. It had to be everything, then. The more you two communicate in the way I mentioned, the less the pressure is in the work area.

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.

Seven represented the same kind of synthesis, and these were both Jane-type productions. After these Ruburt could not make up his mind. If you did not really approve of Prentice as a publisher, then he wondered seriously whether he should follow through with a new house, and with the hopes that Eleanor offered. You typed my book, and I appreciate the work and the reasons, but Ruburt felt it was also because you did not trust Prentice, and always that you thought another publisher would do a better job overall.

This immediately brought certain aspects to light that had been hidden to some extent while you were more physically separated. Some of this has to do, again, with the fact that you thought your concern automatically expressed your love. You were together more. 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.

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.

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.

Eleanor, who professed such greater literary understanding and appreciation for Dialogues, in her turn refused it as well, and also Rich Bed. Ruburt never thought Tam had any great understanding of poetry; but what good did Eleanor’s “superior” appreciation do if the book was refused after such compliments?

After Eleanor’s refusal Ruburt was left with Rich Bed. 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.

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.

It was not that he didn’t accept the responsibility so much as that, in that weakest area, he did not realize the strength of his own conscious thoughts to alter the body mechanism. You can help him most by lovingly reminding him of that.