“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

First of all, let us get a clearer view of your own intents through the years. Looking at your parents, you decided early that you would have a certain kind of relationship with a woman—a closeness that your father did not have with your mother—one that involved many facets of your own personality and with its purposes. Otherwise you would not have married.

Now there must be reasons for that kind of behavior. You make your own reality. If Ruburt’s symptoms represent the seemingly negative aspects of his life, then your dissatisfactions about work represent the same in your private experience. You say to Ruburt “You are using the symptoms as a framework of a sort, in which you feel it safe to progress, though, slowly.” Now in your work you are progressing, but slowly—so why do you magnify the distractions?

(10:05.) Now: it is obvious to you that Ruburt uses his symptoms to control his spontaneity, to mete it out, so to speak. You would never take on such symptoms. You should by now understand some of your own characteristics. They are like Ruburt’s, only a different mixture. You have often tried to control your painting, rather than to let it go through you onto the canvas. And precisely when you come to a point of sudden spontaneity in work, then you use the matter of distractions to slow you down. You seize upon them because you do not trust your own spontaneity in your work.

Frank can say to Ruburt (Frank called Jane a “tough little bird”—which she liked), “Truly, your legs can straighten. The muscles are tight, but they are not impaired,” and you can agree that this is true. Ruburt is faced with the sensation of tightness, however—there is something there in his experience to deal with, so that his senses can conform to his belief about his body. While he tries to free it he is faced with the lingering, quite valid-seeming evidence of his senses. So you are encountering the evidence of your senses, so that the chores seem to hound you. You do not seem to have time in a day to do what you want. As long as you keep telling yourself those things, they will be true. Ruburt is trying to say “There is nothing basically wrong with my body, though in my reality there seems to be.” That sounds like a legitimate statement to you, and it is. I am telling you that the number of distractions in your life is laughable, though in your experience they appear quite threatening. “I am free to do my painting.” How many times have you said that to yourself—yet in that statement lies great freedom, for you must change your belief.

(10:20.) “I can be free and spontaneous in my painting. I can let my ability flow outward through my fingertips and brush, so that I create an entirely new reality upon the board.”

You felt guilty about the picnic table for the same reason. You wanted to be able to buy it for Ruburt, with money from painting. You do not get on top of your own negative thought patterns, therefore, though you can see Ruburt’s to some extent.

The answer is so simple that it is ludicrous. It is simply to believe fully in these ideas, and put them to work precisely in those areas of your lives where you are dissatisfied—to apply them to your own thought patterns, and Ruburt to his.

I said once that Ruburt became hypnotized by the symptoms, and you agreed. But you become as hypnotized by your own thought patterns in certain areas. When you do so your accomplishments seem to vanish, and you cannot take comfort from them. It seems that the ideas do not work only when you do not use them. You react differently to the same set of challenges. Your strengths reinforce each other, but so do your misunderstandings.

(10:42.) Great talent requires great spontaneity. Neither of you really believe it. You put up barriers to protect the creative self from the exterior world, which you fear would destroy it, and from the interior world, for left alone the creative self might just slam paint upon a canvas without discipline, or might show more than we are willing to show. We do not trust ourselves to spontaneously develop our own technique. Spontaneity knows its own order. Order springs from spontaneity, and spontaneity from order.