“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

If you doubted yourselves and feared for the basic goodness of your beings, Ruburt far more than you, then this doubt was still relative and not absolute. By the time you met, however, certain attitudes were already paramount, regardless of your diverse backgrounds.

You both felt that the development of those abilities must be protected, lest the need for financial security lead you into full-time work on a long-term basis. You felt that you must to some extent allow your love for each other to nourish those abilities, and yet not jeopardize them lest it lead you into parenthood.

You felt that you must to some extent at least protect yourselves against your neighbors—who as both of you said often “Would take up all of your time without a qualm”—neighbors or friends who you felt would not understand your goals, however good their intent. You must then jointly protect your time.

I am describing attitudes. Years ago, when it looked—generally speaking, now: I am simplifying—as if you might be swallowed by Artistic, you rebelled and became ill. You made certain readjustments, the sessions began, time went on. You were not selling paintings to any considerable degree. Ruburt knew he would not take a full-time job either. You may sometimes forget now how vehement your joint ideas were in those years, against the ordinary individual’s prospect of working eight hours a day, year after year, in the same place, doing the same thing. So Ruburt added the necessity of money to his creative goals, in a strong fashion.

The same sort of situation operates in millions of families, and the rewards that you gave each other for your creative endeavors were excellent, and worked beautifully. They still do. There is nothing wrong with the other attitudes. You did, however, both for years believe most firmly that your creative endeavors were dependent upon the need for protection from others, the world, from time, and even from any of your own characteristics that did not seem to fit into that overall pattern.

When, as time progressed, the need for constant decisions to speak here and there, to see thus and so, to do housework or write, or whatever, Ruburt simply began to cut down on the body’s availability to action, and he felt that that would take care of that.

You were each for some time relieved. These are patterns of attitudes of long standing, and at different times, as Ruburt improved, and new decisions came to mind, he backtracked, and you largely went along. With the continuation of the physical restraints other problems grew, and Ruburt would become frightened that his body could not indeed heal itself, and you feared the same. The past “failures” seemed indisputable evidence.