“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

Even your father’s originality was of the most practical variety. You had that kind of background to work with and against, then, and this well before the sessions started. They did add an important new link, though. The framework was loosely set up back in that time, however, when for a while, again, you toyed with the idea, for such symptoms would “justify” your staying home even part- time to paint.

Ruburt took on the bargain later, where the symptoms could be used as a backup system, preventing him from going out and working, so adjustments were made along the way. Later they prevented TV tours and so forth, keeping you both oriented at your joint works. This is apart from Ruburt’s worries about revelatory material. The entire framework is indeed based upon a distorted idea of the nature of true responsibility.

Your natural sense of enjoyment and pleasure will lead you back to your “work” naturally and easily.

(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.

(Long pause.) The desk is also another symbol for man’s knowledge of the past. I do want to stress the advantage of examining such events as your visit of the other evening, and the ways in which either or both of you use the framework of Ruburt’s symptoms, while urging you again not to overly concentrate upon such matters. Again, any changes you insert help break up old reactions. Your conscious awareness of the situation, however, will to some extent automatically alter the situation, for you are working with it at another level.

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.

(Note: Lately I’ve been thinking I would like to do some new reading and study of the first century A.D. in the Middle East and Europe, particularly Italy. This time and area still fascinate me. I would like to have a history that deals with that time and area specifically, but don’t know of any such work. [Perhaps my desire will help make one available to me.] Interesting, then, that I subsequently have the dream involving Debbie, with the Roman captain connections.)