“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.

Now: as Ruburt often imagined the worst possibility, and thought that he was being practical in doing so, in terms of his physical condition, gums and all, so you do the same thing in these given areas.

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.

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.