“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The Nebene characteristics, now creatively used, then also mitigated against Ruburt’s easy expression of such feelings, and he did tie up some characteristics of Nebene with his mother’s scorn. He is not worried so much that you have not made a great financial success of your art. He is ashamed of the following feelings:

He feels that you have not tried to make a success of your art, but have used excuses while blaming him for using excuses; that he tries desperately to sell his books, while you will not lift a finger to sell your paintings; that if he waited until he did his best work, he would never have sold a thing.

(A few notes: I have always felt that my early life, being so different than Jane’s, had a lot to do with my approach to painting, once I embarked upon it after meeting her when I was about 34. I didn’t grow up with the consuming urge toward fine art that she developed about writing at an early age. I did commercial work for many years. I have always taken these differences for granted, and evidently assumed too much when I thought she understood them.

(I have for some time thought that Jane needed to sell her writings as a means of justifying her life—whether these writings were her best work was, in that sense, immaterial; she couldn’t possibly wait until her writing was a polished art before beginning to market it. So I don’t believe comparisons between her selling her work, and me selling mine, mean much. I also have an attitude that is quite personal, whether it is a good one or not: I don’t care too much what others think about my painting. Oddly enough, I am sure that my work will end up very successful, both as art and in the marketplace. So I can safely say that in my own way I am trying very hard to make a “success” of my work. Our methods differ markedly, however.

(Therefore I will make a harder effort to do both my art and to make it available to others and to get money with it, to broaden its communicative necessities—this I am perfectly willing to do once I understand its necessity. I do not seem to be the kind to dash off paintings to sell them and let it go at that. I want them to be transcendent. Perhaps erroneously, I didn’t think I could start out with them being that—but I did feel sure that the state would be achieved.)

(A thought: I now realize that Jane put the same interpretation on her own work—namely, the psychic work. It took me years to learn that she regarded her work in the psychic field—and the time and energy involved—as aside from her main creative goal, which is to write “straight” literature that is also art.)

In his own way your father was saying “Since you do not trust my creativity I will deny you its benefits, even if I deny myself its benefits”—this to your mother; and you picked up a taboo: you could make money on art as long as you felt it was not really (underlined) creative—that is, commercial. But you would keep good work to yourself and not sell it. So Ruburt did not accept any of your answers.