“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You believed the painting self had to be protected. For one reason, you identified your painting creative self with your father, and you felt that he had had to protect his creative self in the household from your mother. As these ideas became entrenched, you actually became more concerned with protecting your ability than with using it. You spent more mental energy setting up barriers to protect it, so that any one instance, say, of interruption or conflict, would immediately arouse the power of the buried fear, and become a symbol for it. You learned repression. Therefore, free time was not enjoyed creatively. You could not paint freely in it, for you were so on guard against distractions that anything could distract you.

With a different focus, you for example can paint and write, utilizing both abilities to the best, and sell both. The old framework was so restrictive that your ideas of secrecy, protection and privacy made you want to protect yourself to such a degree that you did not want your paintings to sell, to share them with others. You wanted to protect them—the products of your ability, as well as your ability, from the world.

Ruburt felt he had to protect his writing abilities in the same manner, except that he is by nature more gregarious. He was also poorer than you, and determined never to be so again. The fact that you were not making much money in the framework the two of you accepted, led him to work the harder, determined to publish his work.

His reaction was to not hide the ability in your way, but to force the world to accept it. Again, it is important that since the works were published—even for example the ESP book—neither of you understood your (my) financial contribution. Even to the ESP book, not just the session material that you took down. But your limited focuses blinded you. That kind of contribution was literally invisible—not legitimate, because you had not sold paintings.

Your writing abilities for example would not have emerged had that original course and specialized focus been followed to a “t.” Had that original course and specialized focus been followed to a “t,” Ruburt’s abilities would not have emerged either. In other words the specialized course to which you thought you were trying to hold so tenaciously, was indeed not that tenaciously followed. You each protested, yet did what you wanted to do. You just kept trying to fit what you did into a framework that you had outgrown. You had each identified with that framework so strongly that you were afraid to let it go.

Ruburt’s writing abilities have blossomed because of his psychic experience. Your painting abilities have also. You have not acknowledged that because the paintings have not brought money; you did not want to believe they were valuable, for fear someone would take them away. In a strange manner, you saw to it that your abilities found precisely the elements that would release them, yet your ideas of the writer and the artist prevented you from seeing this.

Now. The psychic work, which is a natural extension of both of your creative abilities, could not be fully utilized by you, individually or jointly, while you maintained such a rigid, specialized focus. Ruburt feared that it might be taking you from your one true purpose as a painter. Not realizing, either of you, your financial contribution through the works, you felt and so did he, after Artistic, that he carried the brunt financially.

In this framework you see yourselves as individuals and as partners in a remarkable creative endeavor that will develop your main abilities easily, and without strain and inhibition. The correspondence has suffered because it has represented your attitudes toward people. As a writer, Ruburt resented the time. As a psychic and incidentally the person, he wanted to answer. The mail also represented business—people who buy books. Inquiries for help, to both of you, represented distractions, those who would take your time, in the old terms, and give nothing.

In the past you have let this go so far, each of you. This time I hope you will see this larger framework, in which you understand that creative abilities must be nourished but not overprotected; in which you see that they have their own greater strength and direction.

Helping Ruburt with the mail is also a financial contribution. It is far more than that, but each of you must understand that you are partners in this endeavor in every part of it. The psychic development did not just occur. Your deepest natures called it out of the probable sequence into your reality—for a reason, because (each of) you knew that it could best develop all of your (respective) abilities to their fullest, and also help others.

Helping others also develops your own abilities in ways that you do not as yet understand. I suggest then a framework in which our sessions are featured. The sessions and their attendant results provide, literally, a multidimensional purpose that allows for your own gestalt individual achievements.