“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

With the book you are in torment as you contemplate the difference between what seems to be the ideal, and its feared actuality. It literally seems more practical and realistic to you that Prentice will somehow ruin the book, than it does to suppose that they will in any way help in bringing about the ideal.

When you let yourself go, your “natural” feelings lead you to fear that they will mutilate photographs, or in some way cheapen the book, dragging it down from the ideal. You have not really gotten it through your head that such thoughts do not represent practical reality, but impractical reality. But the main problem is the dilemma caused by the difference between the ideal and a feared, opposing actuality.

This applies also to the taxes, for in the back of your mind you also think of the good sane uses, the ideal in usage, to which such money could be given. The conflict causes tensions. The same applies to your feelings, until very lately, concerning your mother and the photographs. Here you had your feelings that photographs of the family would disclose a practical actuality far less than, for example, your mother’s ideal image of herself. You feared that in life she was always wounded by photographs because they showed her to be so far less than she wanted herself to be or appear.

This does not mean there are not, for your understanding, “good products and bad products” from your vantage point. It means that the ideal takes many guises, speaks in many forms and voices. What you think of as disclosure is the apparent difference between the ideal and the actuality, as you understand each.

As an artist alone your purpose is expression, which involves disclosure, the difference between the ideal and actual. Be reckless in the expression of the ideal, and it will never betray you. Treat it with kid gloves and you are in the middle of a battle. You demand the best circumstances, the proper conditions, and only then will you face yourself.

Then the joy of the ideal itself is marred for you, and you become over-protective. Your challenge, then, if you believe in the photographs, is to send them out even if it means risking them, rather than refusing the expression of the ideal, which is always self-defeating. You cannot control expression. Beside, the expressed ideal may seek routes actually far more advantageous than ones you might have, planned for it.

He really feared that in actuality he needed gum surgery, and at rock bottom he feared that that was a reality—against which he must fight.