“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You may not achieve ideal solutions with the law, but it should allow practical specific actualization, at least in part, of an ideal situation. You are both quite lucky, in that in your main work you can deal directly with the ideal. In writing and in painting you tackle it. The creative artist is always involved in the expression of the ideal, and his work expresses that ideal as best he can.

In the matter of publishing, or selling paintings, others are involved—others who very rarely in their lives experience that important encounter between, say, the self as actualized and the idealized sensed self, between the painting or the poem as an ideal and the actualization of that ideal. You cannot give such people a general impression of what you want. If you are concerned with such matters as covers that do not live up to your ideals of what covers should be, then you must begin your definitions. Ruburt has primarily been concerned with the ideal that is behind all of his books, and with the practical matter of getting those out into the world. (Pause.) He was willing to put up with a good deal to do so, to overlook lacks of taste in presentation, say.

On the other hand, of course, the very individuality implied in art itself tells you that even the ideal must follow its own eccentric patterns, and that man must find his own way out of his l-a-c-k-s (spelled). Ruburt, however, would rarely deal with such issues at all, though he was aware of them, so you felt you bore the brunt. You cannot expect Prentice to understand the nature of your own idealism, or Ruburt’s, in such a way that Prentice as an entity can apply that idealism to its packaging. Not unless you define, you specify. You get together, the two of you, on each issue, as it happens, and make your decision together, and stick by it. You have not done this before because each of you would become irritated at the other’s mode of behavior.

Ruburt felt that your idealism could threaten the practical distribution of the books, so that his idealistic purpose—to get those words out—could be held back. You felt that the lack of taste, and often of artistic integrity, was so blatant that it blighted the words themselves, marred the message. Both of you were concerned with the ideal. You felt Ruburt was being too “practical,” and would put up with almost anything, and he felt that you were being too impractical at times.

Ruburt’s father always planned to make a new will before his death, and kept putting it off. In the dream Ruburt finds a strange mechanism made by his father that is supposed to dispense some money. A kindly old man appears, who says that Ruburt’s father made this contraption two hours before his death, to ensure Ruburt some inheritance.

Ruburt suspects this man of helping himself in somewhat the same manner, in the meantime. In any case, the mechanism deposits a few coins or so. There is a missing key, and the old man also possesses one to the mechanism, which he finally gives to Ruburt, who then operates it. The odd mechanism represents the mechanics of the law, which his father used poorly, and in fact he died before he had time to make the contraption mentioned in the dream.

The coins represent the small amount of money Ruburt did receive. The old man also stands for Ruburt’s father, as Ruburt thought of him bumming around, frittering away his time and energy, so he was stealing from the pot. There would be nothing left. Ruburt was not greedy, but curious. The missing key represented Yale locks (with emphatic amusement). The dream said “Do not wait too late to set up the legal mechanism,” and affirmed that Yale was at least a good idea. (Pause.) The old man also stood for old man time in the dream, and reinstated the fact that an executor is important, for the old man also stood for —in the dream, now—Ruburt’s father acting as his own executor—meaning that his nature led him to leave ends loose.