“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I found your discussions just now provocative and amusing. And I’m sure that you are each aware of the implications that are involved, in your saving ways —in your dislike of waste (re our new dehumidifier, some old soup I threw out, wine, etc).

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.

(9:13.) In deeper terms creativity springs from what could legitimately be called wasteful action (intently). The rich unconscious is wasteful in those terms, since it seems to you that it contains memories and sensations that are not used in practical everyday life.

Nature deals with abundance, in which there is no waste. Your life rests secure on top of numberless probabilities, but those probabilities, though not realized by you, are not wasted. When you try to tie a great talent down to a practical end like “making a living,” then you are wasteful (forcefully).

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.

(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.

Only in creative play does great “work” emerge. Only from exuberant impracticality do any so-called practical inventions come. The creative mind and spirit transforms the “waste” that others would disdain. It rises above all practicality into those greater realms of emotional and spiritual abundance that gives birth to all worlds.

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.”