“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You live in a safe universe. When you realize this emotionally then there is no need for defenses against portions of yourself, or against the world. You make your own private reality, and in a marriage relationship you form a joint reality.

(12:15.) Give us a moment. It is significant, for example, that you stop your joint pendulum suggestions at such times, for it means you feel the need of a breathing spell, so to speak, to assimilate the changes of behavior. You are each rather surprised at the comparatively fast results.

You stop, each of you, and think “Actually, how safe is this universe in which we dwell?” The money, or the need of it, in your particular situation, becomes merely a symbol for an inner sense that the universe is not safe, and so money becomes a needed security. If Ruburt becomes so spontaneous, then you must be able to make money from your painting, for he might not spend sufficient time at his work.

When that status quo shows signs of changing, you become disturbed. You stop the suggestions. In your society money is like a weapon that you need to protect yourself. You cannot equivocate (to me, forcefully). You must completely accept the fact that you do indeed dwell in a safe universe—one in which you are free to develop, say, your painting abilities to the fullest, without fearing that that development will dull the weapon that brings you money.

You are in a position that you may have never really understood. You do not particularly need more money, but it is coming to you, and naturally as rain out of the sky. Now for once you should rationally feel free in your painting time to paint, released from all requirements of buying or selling. Yet perversely now, of all times, you feel as if your painting must bring money. Why?

Here you encounter all of the ambiguities that have always been connected in this life with your art. You should be pleased that you have, say, even three hours that need not be accounted for in any terms, financial or otherwise, but your own.

If you thoroughly understood that you dwelled in a safe universe, you would need no such concepts. Both you and Ruburt have had a hangup, so to speak. You have believed that so much time “spent” had to produce “so much” creative work, or creative product. (Loudly:)You even more than Ruburt—and that is saying something—have connected creativity and time in a way that is detrimental. That idea has impeded your creativity. Ruburt has struggled with that, but so have you. Your painting time, I tell you—listen to me—had basically nothing to do with clock time. It takes a certain amount of “time” physically to work with a brush. Beyond that, the inspiration of your soul can speak in three minutes, and give you the inspirations of a lifetime (loudly)—but not while you insist that creative time and physical time coincide. This has to do with Ruburt’s symptoms, for he felt that he must be at his desk so many hours, whatever the number, and you became so obsessed with the amount of physical hours that you had to devote to painting that you began to divide up your psyche in terms of time.

Each of you built up your own set of defenses, because you did not believe that the universe was safe for creativity. Ruburt fixed it so that he could only sit at his desk—and for all your protests, my dear friend, you acquiesced. He finally became so physically upset that he is ready to dismiss the symptoms. But he also needed your help, because while the main method was his, your intents were in unison and the same—to protect yourselves and your creativity from an unsafe universe. The unsafe quality showed two faces. One: you had to cut out distractions. And two: one of you had to make money with your art or you would not survive. Between the two of you, you made your decisions.