“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

We are starting anew, and again this time I will not hold another session for you unless you follow what I say this evening.

You are to begin the book together, making notations as what I say applies personally, and together each of you following through with the exercises given. You want results, so, at the very least a ½ hour a day is to be used for this purpose, and when you have the time an hour. Before any time-consuming exercises are given however, read the book together and discuss it as it applies.

Both of you have kept yourselves uneasy in your environment lest you become too comfortable. You concentrate upon the annoyances of your neighbors lest you become too close to them and emotionally involved and touched. You have lived here some years yet purposely avoided thinking of it, this apartment, as anything but transitory lest you put down roots and become involved in ways that might distract you from your work and purposes. Give us a moment.... You do not buy much furniture so that the idea of being transitory is more convincing. At the same time you stay where you are so you can work, while denying yourselves the sense of ease that you could otherwise enjoy.

(To me:) You imagine a quiet home in the country—the dream in that regard in your mind, knowing full well you have no intentions of using “valuable time” to mow grass, fix pipes or tend to furnaces. So you laugh at Leonard, who does so here.

At the same time you think, for several reasons, that at your age you should have a house, privacy to work, a way even of proving to your brothers that you have as much as they. Ruburt instead sees a trailer by the ocean, with each of you writing and painting—his vision, because that establishment requires no housekeeping and a small cash outlay.

A house in town reminds you each of family living, and you of your neighborhood. At the same time for all your protest, the (to me) apartment noises are comforting. You interpret them as conflicts. They remind you of the noises in your family home, conflicting and yet comforting. You rail at them, railing at your parents’ arguments. To Ruburt the sounds are reassuring. He is not alone with his mother any more.

Each of you sees buying a house now as a threat, though you are at times tempted. You have always seen family life yourself as a threat to artistic production, and the first thing you would do if you had a house would be to build a studio outside of it. You did not want children. Whatever methods Ruburt chose to insure that you were childless you proclaimed with joy, glad that you were not the woman.

You have never allowed yourselves creative decorating freedom here, for example, and thus denied yourselves considerable satisfaction. Now the walking is directly involved with all of this. With the ideas of either buying a house or going to Florida, and what these issues involve in line with your current beliefs as given. Your mother’s death makes Ruburt want to go further inward for more answers. At the same time he is trying to make outer decisions.