“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you worked in an art department, even though you knew you were doing “commercial work,” society referred to you as an artist. You had a certain prestige. When Ruburt needed jobs he worked in a factory, or he was a sales clerk or a door-to-door sales person—jobs he felt that gave him no prestige. He was afraid, however, of such jobs—prestigious ones—for fear the need for money would lead him to neglect his work. He became more economical.

For some time in the past, I grant you, you each considered sex uneconomical in terms of time and energy. Rather than avail yourselves of its great refreshment, you thought of the time taken from your work, each of you; beside this Ruburt feared pregnancy, seeing a child not as any kind of fulfillment, but as an artistic and economic disaster.

(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.

(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.

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.

Ruburt will be far better physically. The accomplishment of working this through for yourselves however is far more significant than you realize, for it necessitates motion through fields of consciousness that you and others did not expect existed.