“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last night Jane had a dream she didn’t like. She couldn’t recall it clearly, but it featured her talking to a man, objecting to him that he’d told her something he’d given her would be painless—but that it was instead quite painful: a suicide pill, or something like that, she said. “You told me it wouldn’t hurt...” I was there as a bystander. Jane had agreed to do something that wouldn’t hurt, but it did. I asked that Seth comment.

(This morning Jane and I worked with the pendulum on the question of inspiration, and discovered that there was much there to be learned and clarified in her attitudes, and mine too, for that matter. The three pages of questions we devised are on file. We learned among other things that Jane felt she had to hold off on new inspiration while we fulfilled existing commitments—schedules and contracts, etc., and that she wanted to help type “Unknown” Reality, Volume 2, presumably, I thought so that she could get it out of the way so she’d be free to go on to other things. I hadn’t anticipated her doing that kind of “work,” though. This afternoon she did type on the first session for the book, though, and said she felt much better. We asked that Seth comment on the whole idea of inspiration for her, beyond material he’s already given.

I have given information on this before, but you settled upon the idea of work, as you think of it, because it was the only way at the time that you could justify art to yourself. Naturally, however, your working method is different, and is built up of an intricate series of quite complicated logical judgements involving spatial relationships—in for example particular kinds of immaculate gradations. I am speaking of your painting now.

(10:05.) Give us a moment.... Ruburt has tried to pace himself to you, because it seemed your way was the more practical. He does not think of jobs to be done. The use of the word means one thing to you and one thing to him.

Now let us look at the dream, and also at today’s activities. The dream told him that he had agreed to deaden himself to a certain extent, and that he did not think deadening yourself would be painful. He would just slow everything down. He was confronting the part of himself that decided upon the course to which the other part agreed, while you stood by, watching. He discovered that trying to deaden yourself is quite painful.

When he thinks of work in that fashion, then feelings of responsibility, respectability, scorn or criticism emerge, to thicken the picture. He felt that inspiration was providing so much material that it could not be handled in time. He also felt that his inspiration threatened you with more work, which, it seemed to him, was not particularly pleasant for you, since you often spoke about your difficulties in doing the notes, and only lately have you begun to say when you are doing well.

Very briefly: Instream is astonished at his own opaqueness in life, and the chances that escaped him. The younger man was, when you met him, afraid himself of schizophrenia, and had a great need to establish his own sanity at the expense of anyone who showed any but the most conventional characteristics.

I believe he is teaching, or taught, in a midwestern university. You approached him because of your own quite conventional feelings, that because he was comparatively young he would be broadminded. You also sought to form a contact with someone more or less a contemporary, who was in the psychological field.