“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(See the copy attached of my dream of this morning. To my surprise the dream led to this session. I typed it as soon as I got up, and Jane read it at the breakfast table. As we discussed the dream I began to make connections on my own about my early days in NY City with Ralph Ramstad, as well as about commercial art, my parents, doing illustration, and so forth. I explained these items to Jane in some detail.

The service station is significant on many levels, being used here as a particularly American symbol of the mechanical age, and also one that refers to a pursuit that is utilitarian and also provides service (as Jane said this morning): You deal directly with the public. There are two main areas and issues that wind in and out of this dream, as in the other two: the idea of work and service in relation to the idea of art and creativity.

Some of this has to do with the complicated nature of creativity itself, and with the contradictions that seem to exist at certain levels. Your kind of creativity has always been together and jointly of a private nature—so much so that you do not even like to work in rooms too close to each other. You have often thought of living under more isolated surroundings. Ruburt has been fascinated at times by the idea of working nights, his ways of assuring such isolation. You began to accumulate some ideas of a different nature, wondering more about your responsibilities to the world as adults, wondering how “useful” art should be in the world.

I will certainly. Overall, I do agree, however, that our sessions ideally should not be tied to utility as a primary consideration, but should be freed of such considerations, at least generally speaking, so that their full potential can be expressed. A potential that belongs to all of art, whatever its nature, since it is daring enough, free enough to fly ahead of man’s needs at any given time, and to create a new atmosphere that transforms the nature of being itself.

Our art can help alter people’s views of themselves, change the mental conditions and the psychic atmosphere of our readers. To that extent they activate, say, the entire body defense mechanism, and this is much more likely to happen than it would be if we addressed ourselves to each isolated symptom or individual problem.