“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The money is being achieved or accumulated as a result of your search for the ideal, so it appears twice as ironic to you that the funds for taxes be used to pursue national goals bent, it seems, upon the most gross, shortsightedly practical conditions. This is, if you will forgive the term, beautifully and cleverly connected in your mind with “Unknown” Reality—the book. Here again you find yourself often in a dilemma of your making, between the ideal and what seems to be; if not the grossly practical, something close to it.

For there, you envision on the one hand the best possible book, content, production, et cetera; and as if to purposefully torment yourself, you also envision the opposing “gross practical product” that could possibly result—a product that would only mock by contrast the ideal that is also so vividly envisioned.

More than this, again, any money thus acquired in the future, as in the past, would go to promote the continuance of the very system that, left alone, would mutilate our book, and continue idiotic cultural and political policies that are opposed to what you stand for.

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.

The Bantam (pocketbook) covers are a case in point. In poor taste, it appears—sensationalized. Copycats, unartistic. Those books are for the mass market, and (louder) they touch certain elements in the mass mind that yearn for miracles—looking for the wrong reasons for the wrong things, displayed it seems for the wrong reasons.

In a way with the book and with your art, your purpose is the expression of the ideal, and that expression must be physically materialized, obviously. If you were running a race you would focus upon your own sensations of speed and agility, trying to bring about a perfection of motion. You would consider it obviously impractical to focus instead upon any impediments that might be in the way. You would know better than to mutter over and over to yourself “I will never make it. I am going to trip here or here or there, or someone is going to trip me up, or certainly someone will throw a stone in my path.” Even though someone may have thrown a stone in your path in the past, as a runner such things would vanish from your mind as you concentrated on the feelings in your body of motion and agility.