“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(“Home, sex, power, you and the driveway, hay fever, the impulsive selves that we were talking about earlier tonight”—these are all words dictated to me by Jane abruptly as we sat waiting for the session to begin.

Simple-enough incidents, like shoveling the driveway, can bother you because they arouse old conflicts having to do with your earlier situation and the decision, say, to explore your mental and creative abilities rather than to pursue the physical ones in the excellence of sports.

The excellence in sports, however, also involved the accepted thing to do. Sports even then were looked up to. Rewards were instantaneous for good performance. This involves black-and-white thinking again, however, for you thought of “perfect performance” in sports—high excellence. Something like the driveway usually involves an inner dilemma: “Shall I do creative work or physical activity?” in rather absolute terms.

The driveway involves the sports situation, and also the mainline-America theme—for shouldn’t you be shoveling the walk like your neighbor? This involves questions like “How different am I from my neighbor? What does he think of me, working at home?” et cetera.

There is nothing wrong of course with having your driveway plowed because you have other things that you want to do. That is a simple, excellent, choice.

Give us a moment.... When you feel at the same time that you must and should plow the driveway out yourself, to prove that you are the same as your neighbor, or to prove that you are physically agile, and on the other hand if you feel that you do not want to plow out the driveway at all, then you are in a quandary—and when you shovel, you tell your body to shovel and not to shovel at the same time, setting your muscles against each other.

(This afternoon, by the way, I made arrangements to have our driveway plowed. It’s now clear. It’s also going to be plowed by the service station operator who takes care of our car; whenever the snow accumulates to three inches or so, the clearing-out will be automatically taken care of.