“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your father’s creativity, as mentioned (in other sessions), before, had its side of secrecy, privacy and aloneness. Again as mentioned, you identified creativity with your father’s private nature. The writing self became latent as the sportsman did, yet the writer self and the artist were closely bound. You felt conflicts at times. It never occurred to you that the two aspects could release one another—one illuminating the other—and both be fulfilled. Instead you saw them, basically now, as conflicting. Time spent writing meant time not spent painting.

(Which reminds me that when Jane and I lived at 317 South Elmer in Sayre, PA, I kept telling myself that by the time I reached 40 I would decide which I wanted to pursue. And when I reached 40, I picked painting.)

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.

Now. You knew you needed training and experience to do any writing. You would never consciously face what appeared to be the conflict between writing and painting. You would not take the time out consciously from painting to write. In the framework there was a nagging conflict. You managed to get the training, the experience, in such a way that you by-passed the seeming conflict.

Now. Remember what I said the other night, about the lack of encouragement there on your part. It is highly interesting, considering your ease of mobility, and brings in many more aspects than you realize. For Ruburt, dancing, his one inclination to flaunt himself, comes into direct conflict with your ideas of privacy and secrecy. When he is obviously not in the best of physical condition and then wants to dance, this to you is showing his weakness to the world. You, with your history of athletic behavior, and your love of “perfect motion,” immediately contrast his activities with the time when he danced with the greatest of ease.

I am going to try to help you enlarge that focus, and I know that the time is right. First of all, you must realize it is futile to say “Why does understanding take so much time?” Or “Why have we been so opaque?” Or in your case “Why has it taken me so long to be a good painter?”

After not going out for a while the fear would reassert itself, of looking ridiculous and facing people, so there would a time until he again became defiant and conquered it. The love of the sportsman for motion can instead be used to encourage him toward physical performance. He saw, the day that you slept (last Saturday, January 26) that he is always afraid of his performance in your eyes—that he gets up more often when you are not watching. This natural love of good bodily performance however can indeed be used, and most effectively to your joint advantage once you realize its source.

He felt that in the world’ s eyes this put you down, since your paintings were not selling. At the same time he could not accept your legitimate financial contribution through the work because he felt that might betray you as an artist. His job then was to encourage you to paint and sell your paintings, for he felt nothing else would satisfy you, and/or satisfy your brothers or your family.

At the same time, and somewhat because of your attitudes, he felt his womanly reality a threat to both of you as artists. A new organization is more than in the making. It is happening on both of your parts, and I am bringing it to the surface of your attention.

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.

Now. While you smile at me, you still think that you must protect yourself against distractions, as if they are purposely lined up like enemies against you. This has nothing to do with consciously deciding how you want to spend your time, but with those inner fears that make you think of your time as something that must be protected—that considers your talent so fragile that it will wither if you do not make great effort to protect it.

If your idea of protecting your talent could be transferred to a plant, you would keep it in a corner, a dark one, in a room in which no one could enter, and spend your time worrying about drafts, no matter how well you had closed the windows and doors.