“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Nature realizes that there is no such thing as waste. This statement applies also to your earlier questions this evening about the sperm. Nothing in the stream of life is wasted, and everything, whether in your system of reality or not, is in the stream of life. You were born in the Depression, Ruburt shortly thereafter. Thrift was a necessity in those times. There were great contrasts in that period, however—deprivation, severest economic conditions, a spareness of attitude, set off by the greatest criminal activity, the wildest of parties. People broke the prohibition laws who never drank before, and did not like to drink. The ideas of thrift and the puritan attitudes were not the result of the Depression, but helped cause it.

Many people were afraid of the wealth they had amassed. Their severe religious training made them feel that any luxury was sinful —and so they set about to upset their own apple cart. They were aided by those who had not yet “so succeeded”—people driven by envy. No one should at least consider a lush field filled with all kinds of cultivated flowers sinful. Luxury is not sinful, and there is no such thing as waste. While you believe that there is, however, then you are faced with it.

(9:30.) Give us a moment.... It, the machine, rebukes you by its presence, because it represents a dilemma. All of this is quite aside from the exterior energy crisis. The grasping, licentious attitudes connected with world energy are the results of the same attitudes. There is not an energy crisis. While you believe, however, that energy is limited then you are gluttonous for using it at the expense of poorer nations—who will then, sharing the same belief, retaliate. Energy must be used. It creates more of itself. It cannot be hoarded.

Ruburt has been trying to be economical in terms of money, energy and time. He differed from you only in that he carried your own ideas and his further in certain respects. In others, financially for example, he broke away first and you followed. The idea of the spare, poor young artist or writer, living romantically in a garret or poor apartment, has served as a handy self-image for many in their early years, providing a sense of dignity that enabled such apprentices to make their way. You chose the circumstances. You purposely chose a time involved in which writers and artists had it “hard”—so you cannot turn around then and blame the society. You each wanted to be apart from it to some extent. You (RFB) proved to yourself that your art could support you when you were young. You made good money. Then you immediately disentangled your abilities from economics in a particular fashion. You used your dexterity in “artistic” ways in your jobs—but the bulk of your artistic yearnings were divorced completely from the world at large. Ruburt did not know that his abilities could ever bring him money.

(9:54.) You tried to separate emotions from work—an impossibility. Compare for a moment, if you can, your love of technique in a painting with the way you write. You have been searching for a larger-than-life technique—looking for the greater dimension in which beloved details rest—and only your own ideas of economy have hampered you. There is greater economy in what you think of (underlined three times) as waste—a divine economy in which “all” waste is lovingly used and transformed.

You have your existence now as yourself. Nebene has his existence in his own now as himself, and there are many others. Joseph in Seven is a representation of another portion of your being that is connected with Bill Macdonnel. Your “purpose” is to bring those diverse aspects together, to form them into your own kind of artistic production—to wed in your life and art those seemingly diverse qualities of spontaneity and order, spareness and abundance, beloved detail and wholeness, and to form in your life and art a new kind of synthesis.

He took these steps for his own reasons, but you have come together in a joint reality, so his situation is teaching you things that you wanted to learn, and you are learning through his example. You would not take on that physical coloration. In a way however you are working through the same problems artistically, and Ruburt would never accept that coloration, so he has learned from you there.

When a masterpiece is created everything else is forgotten, and so it is with life situations. It is silly in painting to say “Why did I at first choose that color, which did not work, instead of the final completed hue?” You have in art underpainting. In life you work with many “underpaintings” at once—and while it may seem at any given level that one underpainting lacks or is weak, later it will be seen as an important part of the whole.