“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The nuclear power plants are connected in your mind. It seems not only as money taken from you, or from Ruburt, which annoys you more, since you think he worked so hard for it—but worst of all, the money is being spent to promote national stupidities of distorted beliefs, to which you are diametrically opposed.

In your mind you creatively envision the ideal—the sanity of some future culture that, hopefully, our work and others will bring about: if not tomorrow, some “time.” On the other hand, you face the evidence of today; almost, though not quite, it seems, the worst picture possible, the antithesis of what is desired. And it seems to you that your money is being used to prolong those conditions.

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.

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.

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.