“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt received certain kinds of knowledge by taking various jobs throughout his early adulthood, including factory work or whatever. That knowledge was used in all of his writing. On a certain level he took those jobs because he needed money, not because he needed experience in other lines of work or with other kinds of people. When he sold Avon he was hearing the questions that his own work would later try to answer. He could not have faked pretending to need the jobs, or it would not have worked, so neither of you could pretend to have physical difficulties so that you could, for example, put yourselves in other peoples’ shoes.

—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.