“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

When you overwork the idea of responsibility—or service to the world—you erode that pleasure. All in all an excellent session, of course.

(“You don’t have to go into it now, but will you discuss the mail situation and the idea of responsibility?”)

(“The same thing,” I said. “It all basically has to do with this idea of responsibility. If you can get rid of that you might be home free. If it was up to me, I’d throw the idea of responsibility down the hillside and into the river.”

(“You’d be free to do anything you want to,” I said. “The idea is you’d be free to do as you please. You could answer it, or any part of it, as you wanted to.... Wouldn’t it be a scream if a relatively innocuous-seeming dream like that one marked the turning point in this thing?” Indeed.