“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Think of the slides shown today (by Loren) of postcard Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, USA, home of conventional, American, Protestant values. I am (underlined) generalizing here to make a point: a largely postcard land, in which social clichés pass for communication, in which social ceremonies take the place of private communications—a land in which beliefs must be like landmarks, unchanging, utterly dependable, always there to be used for touchstones lest the puritanical Protestant stray from worthy goals. A land in which things must be judged thus-and-so, a land in which people disappear as much as possible into established family and social roles, where the lines are clearly marked.

(11:19.) Such communities have few poets, few artists, and fewer mediums. Tunkhannock is actually an idealized version of that kind of community. In those terms (underlined) it is for Loren a step up from, say, Sayre, whose history is richer even in “lower class” origins. Sayre, however, generally now, represented the poorer man’s version of that American ideal, and it was from there that many of your beliefs and those of your brothers had their origins.

It is as ridiculous to prove your worth by working in a conventional sense as it is to prove your worth by not working in a conventional sense. Americans have had a fine and often understandable disdain for what was thought of as the European gentleman, or even the literary gentleman, or the man who somehow or other did not have to “rub elbows with the masses.”

Not to work at an ordinary job, or at a clearly defined occupation, has always had a tint of European decadence to Americans—and that is to some extent the result of the early Protestants’ attitude toward the wealthy, robed gentlemen of the late medieval, Roman Catholic Church.

(11:34.) But you worry that you are a failure in the framework of that postcard American system, even though now you see quite clearly that the postcard system is not bright and glossy, but a facade, behind which lurks a great sadness.

There is a long history connected with such American Puritan beliefs about morality, having to do with the fact that medieval priests were sometimes licentious, and opulent. They did not work in the field (except for the poor monks), and the Protestants determined, for example, that their ministers would have families, work with the people, and be too busy for licentious leisure activities.

(“It’s vague now: Americans not trusting creative thought unless it applies specifically to practical considerations.... nothing new there; I guess I’ve just forgotten it.... There was the idea that true creative work is the springboard for the more usual kind.... and something about vocations being distrusted in this country....