“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“But now where’s all that stuff I was picking up from Seth today?” she demanded. “Here it’s session time and I don’t have an idea in my head....” So after all this time she still preferred to know in advance what was coming up in a session.

Drawing and painting during such periods was considered both sacred and immensely useful at the same time. There is indeed a kind of communal dream life, then, in which each individual contributes—a dream life in which both living and dead play a part, in your terms.

At its very heart, creativity of that nature is indeed both sacred and highly useful, and from that dimension of activity all of the initial patterns (underlined) for your highly technological society have come. Your society has emphasized and exaggerated the objective characteristics of life to such an extent, however, that art seems to be an esthetic, fairly remote phenomenon, quite divorced from physical time. It might delight the eye as decoration, or cover a blank spot upon the wall.

The world of art or literature, or music or learning, was closed to him. When your country began its own saga, each individual was to be considered equal, regardless of birth. Many of these same people had been denied advantages in Europe. They were upstarts. What they did was establish equal starting lines for an incredible race in which each began with an equal position and then tried to outdo the other, freed of the class distinctions that had previously hampered them. Because there were few ground rules, and because it takes time to develop a culture, this rambunctious group set out to tame the continent, to show Europe that Americans could do Europe one better, without a king and without pomp.

(Pause at 10:22.) Because many people do realize that important contribution, you are financially secure. In that larger framework of activity, your creativity is being rewarded (still intently). Then what an outrage do you work against yourself when you try to justify your position in terms of money or worth according to the most parochial limits and social expectations of your time.

They also rise partially whenever you think of yourself as a male first or primarily, and then as an individual. You are an individual first of all and a male secondarily. You could be an individual male or female, but (louder) you could be neither if you were not an individual first of all—and that individual, again, happens to have an unconventionality of mind and ability most needed in your time and space.

(10:30.) Give us a moment.... To some extent you felt you had to prove your worth as a conventional male, in—if you will forgive me—the narrowest of parochial terms, though you were possessed of abilities that were considered conventionally male only if they could be suitably laundered: art turned into commercial work, and other creative abilities, such as your writing, that at one time could have turned into several fields—the writing of Westerns, even. You felt the ordinary male accomplishments in terms of sports, which brought instant approval, yet you did not choose that road.

I do not know if I am expressing this clearly. Ruburt tried in the family to express independence, to show that he was (underlined) a writer, and at the same time he tried to express dependence, to show that he was a good wife, and this applied to many social relationships as well. If he succeeded as a writer, it seemed he was less the loyal wife, and sometimes in the past—the distant past—you felt the same when you tried to be “the male provider,” and take a job to satisfy that narrow role.

Now you can drop such nonsense, and realize that often both of you have fought paper dragons. The same applies to Ruburt’s bouts with “work,” sometimes directly opposed to his ideas of creativity. He has to be “working” all the time, so people will see he is not just a dumb housewife. (I laughed.)

—in your thoughts. Try to realize that even in your terms there have been multitudinous cultures upon the face of the earth, each one defining for all time, with great moral rectitude, the roles of men and women. There have been freer, more exuberant beliefs systems, and there have been more limiting ones, so look at those of your culture as they influence you as simply one of the ever-varying social fabrications by which a man colors his days.

(Jane was also surprised at the amount of time that had passed. She’d had no sense of time passing, whereas at other times she might have quite a definite sense of “the psychological distance,” or time that had passed.