“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(One of the questions concerned Seth’s material on page 218 of the last session, when he referred to the feeling that Jane and I have, that we had “an even more unfair advantage” without children—this, as he’d stated earlier, on top of our already being set apart from others because of our creative gifts. “It’s like you’ve got to atone for being “better” or different than others, according to that kind of thinking,” I said at 8:10. “It’s the sort of thing I think is rooted in Sinful-Self stuff, on both of our parts—you’re not going to feel guilty about the gifts of nature unless those feelings have a pretty strong base in the psyche, somewhere.... Why can’t we feel glad about being gifted instead?” I added that as I’d said this afternoon, guilt about superiority would make a lot of gifted people miserable if they paid attention to such thinking. And I’m afraid that history contains numerous examples wherein that very reaction has taken place. I realize that the very handicaps adopted could also be part of the given personality’s overall plan for life—contending with that as well as the gifts.

(Long pause.) Your mother believed that a man should work so many hours a day in conventional ways, whether he owned his own business or worked for others—and also of course that he should have a family. At certain levels (underlined), your brother Loren once compared your art to his love of trains—an enjoyable hobby, but not something to which a man devoted his life.

(8:32; eventually a one-minute pause.) The symptoms have served to “allow you” a certain privacy, A certain detachment from the world, while at the same time providing a way of relating to others, of sharing life’s misfortunes so that it might not be said, for example, that as artists or people you lived in an ivory tower, untouched by life’s usual dilemmas. Again, there were twists and turns through the years as the symptoms might serve one purpose more than another at any given time, but falling within the general category.

(8:47.) Ruburt interpreted one dream in particular for you. I have little to add. He was correct (about the dream of July 7, involving my return to Sayre). The dream in which he was healed (of July 19) was to remind you that that probability is still highly active. The dream involving the old granary is of the same nature as the bookstore (Sayre) dream (as Jane said tonight)—another version of it, reminding you of the kind of nourishment generations of the past received. As there were no real books in your bookstore, there was no available food in the granary. In the bookstore you felt that in a way the store was bigger than life, however, and in the granary dream Debbie’s drawings of you are idealistically bigger than life. They represent her version of your life and work. If the granaries are gone, and if they provide no nourishment, then she looks to work like ours instead to provide a kind of idealized picture of human psychology.