“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You can return a badly wrought piece of furniture and get your money back—but what do you do when you understand that you form your own reality, and also decide that you aren’t pleased with large segments, at least, of the product?

It is for a while perhaps more difficult once you understand that you do form your own psychological reality, for you feel responsible for events that earlier gave you concern, perhaps, but no feeling of inadequacy. When you believe that the world is indeed chaos, then you are thankful for any portions of order or creativity you find within yourself.

You are trying to live your lives, speaking simply now, at two mutually exclusive levels, combining two lines of belief that contradict each other. As a result any one action you take does not satisfy you, for you are equally drawn to the other direction. Events then are not clearcut or satisfying. You cannot thoroughly relax or thoroughly go ahead. You cannot thoroughly enjoy your solitude, or thoroughly appreciate your friends and normal social activities. You see in Ruburt’s physical condition the clearest representation, but this is simply the clearest sign of events that exist in your own private experience also. You go out into the world to do the chores, grudgingly, but you go. Ruburt goes ahead creatively, lately, grudgingly, but he goes.

In all of this your accomplishments seem like nothing to either of you. On the one hand you “believe” that you form your own reality, and on the other you believe that things will most likely go wrong unless you do something to stop them; and this is the most conventional world view that forms the experience of, say, the newspaper world.

You are faced of course with conditions built up of long-held attitudes. In general, however, you are tying the highest faculties of your consciousness to goals that are at least unbecoming to them, and because you have still accepted the tenets of conventionalized beliefs. You cannot serve two masters at any one time with hopes of doing justice to either, and you only confuse yourselves. It is the mixture of consciousness with which you form your events that causes the difficulty.

In one area, that of money, Ruburt is fairly free, finally. You consider taxes as a symbol of the creator’s support of the mass world—that is, you feel forced to contribute to a world with which you do not agree. You feel that that world threatens you, and yet you must support it. But the threat—and you must try to understand me—the threat does not exist in that world, but only in your beliefs toward it. You are in that world of threat only according to the degree of power you allow it to have over you.

(Much louder:) Now these are words of the profoundest wisdom, from the fountains of your own psyches, as well as from my own knowledge—and against those words you should judge your own actions, so that you do not react to threatening situations, whose validity exists only at a level of consciousness which you must learn to dismiss.

You want other people to think you are working as hard as they are, or harder. You do not want them to think that your money came easily, which in a way it did. At the same time you say how good it would be to just take a job and come home when it was finished—a self-deception. You know better.

(10:28.) Ruburt over-worries, now, with any new creative project: will it find readers? Is it important? Will it sell? And you smile. You worry about what the publisher will do with the book after it sells—what will happen to it, and imagine the ways in which it can be ruined. Two sides of the same coin.

In no way should that tending take away from your creative work, but add to it in ways that defy conventional ideas of time. With that understanding, such work would vastly enrich your painting, your writing, and the tenor of your life. With that understanding you can have help without conflict, or do the work yourself without conflict.

The point is, you must act, each of you. You are getting the best information you could possibly get. What you do with it is up to you.

You must renew your sense of dedication, privately and jointly. I have some definite proposals, and I suggest that you take advantage of them. I am mainly going to suggest the use of certain techniques with which you are quite familiar. You have not used them as a way of life because of the conflicts mentioned earlier, and if you are going to get off dead center and do something instead of complaining, you must each begin to put these to practice. They worked well years ago, before you tried to wed two systems of belief to each other.

When you had a job the issue was clear for each of you: in your free time you felt you had a perfect right to paint or write, do relaxation exercises or psychological time. Later, when you did not need jobs and the books began to sell, then your creative time also became productive-money time to some extent.

Ruburt began to allow only psychic experiences that could be translated also—not primarily, you see—but also into financial productivity. You also wanted to wed your abilities in the same manner. You felt you could not afford free creative work. Ruburt felt that creative work could pay. Because of your ideas about time and creative work you felt that painting could not pay. Ruburt tricked you quite cleverly into doing the sketches for Dialogues—for your own good, he felt, and you did not enjoy the experience, allowing your beliefs to contaminate your creativity. You do not feel the world deserves creative work. Yet you have a nature that demands that you produce it.

I will have more to say about that particular subject, but first I want to start you with proposals. You may wonder how they are to be carried out, though they are simple. They will come into conflict with your concepts of time, and will automatically begin to alter your subjective realities if you follow them. If you do not matters will continue as they are. I will leave your hours up to you. While you have regular daytime hours, I suggest the following pattern.

Each day should include, separately, a half hour alone that includes relaxation techniques and psy-time. This should be followed to begin with for each of you, by 10 minutes of yoga exercises. Ruburt should do the most simple ones. Then you should instantly get up. You are to take a 10-minute walk daily. That is a spiritual exercise as well as physical activity. Ruburt should, as I suggested some time ago, have a private phone. Class at least once a month, later twice a month, never more for now.

All of this will demand changes instead of complaints. Except for lip service, you do not encourage Ruburt in physical pursuits at all, or reward him for any accomplishments in that area when they do show. In the same way he encourages you to have the lawn or the driveway done.

The recommendations I have made even so far will alter conditions. If you relax and do psy-time for example, your reality will automatically change, for the intent that allows you to do this will automatically begin to produce results. This applies to each of you.

(Louder:) Do you plan to follow my recommendations?

Do you plan to start tomorrow?

(“Yes, or at least as soon as I can get this typed. We can do some of it tomorrow, though.”)

That is the end of our session. I expect—since you agree to my recommendations—that they will be followed. Do not be discouraged if psy-time does not bring instant results—though it well may. These recommendations can change your lives, and set you in those directions proper for you.