“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.

You did not dwell consciously on the kind of woman you wanted. Some men never achieve any kind of creative or stable relationship with a woman, and so they are acutely aware of that lack in their lives. One purpose was met, then, when you married Ruburt. Your desire to paint, per se, did not emerge full blown when you were a young man, and one probable self is happily engaged in commercial artwork. He wonders what would have happened had he done something else. You did not meet Ruburt either until you were in your thirties, so the challenges set were not those that would be solved by a conventionally young man.

You could have followed still another course—one in which you did not become involved in any intellectual or challenging concepts but bypassed them completely. That kind of painting can be excellent, but it also involves an intense immersion in the emotions, to the exclusion of any important conceptualizing. The greatest kind of painting includes both the intuitions and the intellect, but in your terms this also requires the maturing of the high intellect. You decided to take that course. In a different way Ruburt chose the same journey. Had he not delved into deeper questions, he could very well have been the novelist, going no further than a novelist can into the nature of personality or motivation.

I am telling you this as simply as possible, knowing that one day I will get through. Ruburt had his fantasies this morning. When he wrote them down he got on top of them, so to speak, and he could decipher their meaning. At the risk of your considering this Pollyanna, you get what you concentrate upon. When you concentrate upon the limitations and the distractions, then they multiply. They attract others until the present seems filled with them, while other imagined ones rush toward you from the future. When I say to Ruburt “Do not concentrate upon the symptoms because you reinforce them,” then you agree, Joseph, and it makes perfect sense. When you see Ruburt going around for days concentrating upon the physical limitations, then it is oh so clear to you where his difficulty lies. You wonder what is wrong with him, that he cannot understand what he is doing.