“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

Your idea of looking at events as you did the other evening (re Tom D’Orio) is excellent, and can be most illuminating. There will also be days when it is quite obvious that the framework provides only for your own inconvenience and discomfort—but the fact that it is a framework, created and maintained, is important.

(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.

If you could manage it, working nights for a temporary period will also have the same kind of value, again, while automatically adding its own elements —that is, of providing relative isolation in a different way. I realize the difficulty that involves both because of practical living, and the question of light for painting. The focus upon the idea of pleasure will further alter the situation for the better, however, for again it inserts a different kind of focus.