“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

As she was in life, she would not have understood in any case unless the money definitely came from a recognizable, socially accepted output on your part. To some extent, the affair of Crowder’s death made you look at yourself through what you thought were your mother’s eyes. You were judging yourself, and have, with some regularity, according to those standards. This is at an emotional level, of which of course you do not intellectually approve.

Of course, you rebelled against such feelings and beliefs, but you did not rid yourself of them. You remembered being in Florida—the tempera episode —when you were supposed to be starting an enterprise with Crowder, and at that particular emotional level it seemed to you that you had made few inroads since —and again, you disapproved.

In a fashion you see your father as inventive, creative, and highly vulnerable. These ideas merge with conventional beliefs about age, so that it seems you must take stock. But when you take stock with the feelings we are describing as the emotional yardsticks, those feelings consider valid only the beliefs that go along with them—a traditional male role: the accumulation of money through traditional means—and they discount as legitimate the accumulation of knowledge or wisdom as a pursuit of life. Your mother would say “posh.”

Emotional shoddiness upsets you. When you become enraged at Prentice you are of course enraged against the larger defects of the world—but Prentice’s defects are the ones that come of course to your own more immediate attention.

Give us a moment.... in a fashion Ruburt and Tam’s seemingly emotional, fairly spontaneous relationship has represented good common business sense on Ruburt’s part. Regardless of what better deals businesswise you may or may not have made in the past, both of you would have been highly discomfited by any frequent change of publishers. Part of your personal problem now is because you feel you have cut off the easy flow of creative energy into your painting and into Mass Reality, and even to some extent—on your part, now—because the contracts are unsigned, and the flow in that area momentarily is somewhat impeded.

Divide your time between Mass Reality if you want to and your painting. It does not matter which of you handles the business end, as long as you have as much peace of mind as possible, and as long as you judge events as clearly as possible, according to their actual proportion as apart from their emotionally charged symbolic content.

That area has also suffered because of your joint ideas of what artists should be like, and what men and women who happen to be artists should be like. Think that one over. That emotional flow is important.