“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your money will go into ventures you approve of. Underline that sentence. It will be used to support people or ventures that in one way or another seek goals that are in line with our work. When you thoroughly understand what is meant by the entire safe universe concept, then the physical, cultural climate is understood as a medium through which the ideal can be expressed—can be expressed. The ideal is meaningless if it is not physically manifest to one degree or another. The ideal seeks expression. It seeks those channels that it instinctively knows will yield expression. In doing so it often seems to change or alter in ways that are not understood.

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.

(Louder for the next several paragraphs:) Your joy, your challenge, should be in the expression of the ideal as you see it, whether or not you can in your terms count upon the consequences, or the impediments—whether or not the expression comes to fulfillment in your terms—and even if it seems to fall on ground on which it will not grow.

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.

(11:00.) You cannot inhibit such expression out of fear, without experiencing tensions. As you become accustomed to the idea of “reckless” expression of the ideal, then it is free to find “more perfect” expression. It clears its own roads.

Your feelings, however, are based upon personal and cultural background—the unsafe universe, in which inspiration must be guarded and protected. It is seen as basically so weak that it requires an artillery of attitudes and a fortress of concepts to protect it. Unimpeded expression of the ideal, however, is the most powerful force in the world, and cannot be impeded.

Your joint ideas of the ideal, its expression, and feared closure, was in the past also largely responsible for your joint embarrassment over Ruburt’s physical condition, your joint shame over his appearance.

He was indeed expressing the ideal of his life to a far greater degree than most, but in those areas, where its expression lagged, the contrast seemed so varied in your joint eyes as to make the ideal seem a lie by contrast. If others had the same attitudes toward someone in the same kind of difficulty, you would straighten them out at once.

Prentice’s mutilation of the photographs is the same thing on your part. You are taught that to be practical is to expect the worst. To expect the best is Pollyanna. Despite that belief, however, you have both managed to express the ideal, and to clear, whether you realize it or not, one area of life after another.

Postscript: certain conditions have already changed for Ruburt, so that he can express energy more exuberantly. He can collect it, and yet let it flow through him with greater strength.