“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Very slowly:) For a while you (underlined) considered the possibility of adopting a “handicap,” such as one might in sports. You tried the role on for size, deciding finally that you could not accept it (my back trouble at 458, etc.).

(Long pause.) Your purposes meant that you required a certain amount of isolation from the world—so any handicap that was accepted would also be one that fit into those other purposes.

—They were simply brushed up and renewed. They represented a kind of psychological handicap. The situation also helped serve to explain, you felt particularly in the beginning, oddities of your own behaviors in regard to society. When you gave up your job you did not have to explain why you did not have to find another as “any normal red-blooded male should do,” but stayed at home devoted to a time of painting and philosophy. You also had a wife to look after who had physical difficulties.

(Long pause.)In a way, to a degree—the qualifications are necessary—you provided yourselves an extra kind of commitment that would keep your observations of life from becoming too surface, or so it seemed. When your parents were alive, their problems could be used somewhat in a second-handed fashion for the same purposes. Before that, jobs for both of you served to make you rub elbows, so to speak, with others, and to equalize your paths and theirs. As you became better off financially you felt the need again for that kind of equalization, or handicap.