“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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.

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.

If you thought of some particular motions that would help you and add to your performance, it would of course be obvious self-defeatism if you said ahead of time “No, it probably would not work. Someone will most likely shove against me to mar that particular motion.”

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.

When Ruburt as an individual sought to heal himself, and at the same time sought to divest himself of traditional methods of healing, such as doctors and so forth, he embarked upon a journey through his own beliefs—but also through the beliefs of your own culture. He is coming out on the other side. Again, your discussion about the dentist was vital to him, because he finally understood his attitudes—not only in that area but others; and in those areas, no matter what he told himself, he was afraid that the worst was really happening, or would happen.