“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.

In the next scene, you have the introduction of the artistic ability, however, personified by your friend of your younger New York artistic past. He represents someone highly gifted artistically, and therefore stands for your artistic self as you might have idealized it when you knew that young man. When he tries to put on ordinary working clothes, however, something happens: the shorts keep changing into a Turkish towel, and harder he tries to pull the pants on the more and more they change, until there is no mistaking that the shorts simply will not do.

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 added that I thought I was already doing, at least to some extent, what Seth advocated in the session—throwing away any sense of responsibility or financial reward in painting, at this time at least. I trusted that whatever might result from the painting would be beneficial in various ways, possibly including the financial if the need arose. I explained to Jane that I’d reached the point in the last year where I just couldn’t let anything interfere with the act of painting itself—and that I thought she needed an attitude like that in regard to her own work very badly. I could have said [in retrospect] that my attitude stemmed at least to a large degree from my watching her struggle with her own hang-ups. Not that I didn’t think I’d reach it on my own anyhow.