“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.

Plants also need water beside sunlight. Let us say for our analogy that water provides the free-flowing motion of ideas circulating through the psyche freely. It is as if Ruburt said “Aha, I must have the sun, or economic security, so my abilities can grow,” and became so concerned about that that he forgot the need for watering.

When I say economy however I am not simply speaking of economics in financial terms—rather in the larger meaning of economy in sparing down, cutting out nonessentials, fearing to waste not simply money, but energy or time. All of these ideas are based upon the fear that an individual possesses only so much energy that must be hoarded, directed—not easily, but with fantastic force. The clothes dryer in the basement represents energy that you are afraid to use. You realize you have the money to run the machine, or to buy the washer. It seems somehow sinful, however, wasteful and wrong.

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.

There is nothing strange in the fact that Ruburt begins to have sexual feelings as the muscles begin to feel toward flexibility (legs). His physical difficulty has involved then his ideas of economical action—the cutting out of waste. These ideas, again, are a part of the one line of consciousness that says “You have only so much energy and so much time. You must therefore ‘use’ time and energy well; practically you must not waste time or effort. If you have a purpose and you want to achieve it badly enough, then everything else must be sacrificed for it—because “time marches on.” “Time is money.”

(10:12.) Deep friendships are out, for they are not practical. They would take time and energy that should be devoted to work. Now no one is saying— me least of all—that you forget ideas of needed solitude. There is little worry that either of you will do that (emphatically). Yet there can be danger that you forget that creative time can produce in an hour magic creations that ten hours of frightened, enforced time can never do—and that a moment’s inspiration in a bar, or with company, or on a walk in the park can bring forth world-changing theories that no amount of fearful economy of time will ever deliver.

Most of this is out in the open, but you did not understand the connections that existed between your ideas about the dryer and food and frames, and how they applied to your mental and physical habits. Your art is set off by your frames—so you deny your paintings their natural setting.