“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(We’ve learned a good deal about Jane’s symptoms, working with the pendulum since Monday’s session. We’re keeping a list of all questions, with the daily answers, and are now seeing some notable shifts in answers, indicating improved communication between her conscious and unconscious selves.

This is the same person who on the other hand used to put up barriers of bookcases at one end of the living room to protect himself from any neighbors or miscellaneous callers; who objected when Mr. Gottlieb dared to cross into his private working area and glance at a paper. In the face of those fears, Ruburt did progress from someone who was afraid to read poetry to friends, to someone who ran an excellent class of nearly 50 people—all of the time denying that any fears existed. Not faced, the fears grew.

You felt that commercial art would work financially, because it belonged to the times, yet even then the comic book market, you felt, was falling beneath you as the public’s ideas changed, and (Mickey) Spillane’s comic strip fell beneath censure. You simply would not, later, curry the world’s favor with your paintings—even if, through hard work, financial success might follow. You did not trust people to know good work when you produced it.

Ruburt decided to brazen it through—to do his thing and be paid for it. At the same time Ruburt carried the fears mentioned. He hoped for the world’s approval, for he knew his work was good. On the other hand he carried the beliefs of this afternoon’s dream—that originality made a person instantly suspect, and that in the ordinary world, if you put yourself in the world’s eye its people would hunt you down. In opposition, he carried the belief that he should go on television, make tours, and so forth, and expose himself in direct opposition to those fears.

Now you are exceptional people, and exceptional people in your work are quite simply exceptions. You deal with relatively rare, different kinds of achievements and challenges. Many of your correspondents are quite average, though to you they seem deplorable. They are not used to dealing with imaginative concepts, or conceptual thought, or of applying the intelligence to the realm of the imagination. Often they cannot discriminate between good work or poor work, artistically. They are drawn to what emotionally arouses them or offers them hope, even though they may only be able to put a small portion to practical use. They deal with emotional realities that are rather apart from your own concerns.