“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.