“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Following those items, I wanted Seth to comment on question 2, having to do with the good things we’ve accomplished over the years.

(As for myself, I’ve been trying to get in four hours of painting each day, without succeeding, by the way, but it’s still a real treat. Last Saturday I bought over $30.00 worth of flower seeds, and I’m slowly trying them out in a variety of pots and containers to see which flowers do best under what circumstances—artificial light, natural light, etc. It’s turning out to be quite an intriguing endeavor, and I plan to keep the house decorated with fresh flowers winter and summer.

Such images have little to do with your own basic or natural personalities, or with your own individual backgrounds, but you apply such images upon yourselves like overlays. In such cases you are unable to really estimate your own progress of your own accomplishments, for you are not looking at them based upon your own capabilities and inclinations, but using the hypothetical idealized images instead.

(I should add here that as Seth gave this material I found myself thinking that that wasn’t too bad a way to go, after all. I do admire that intense focus, that wholehearted commitment, and history offers plenty of examples—famous, too, if you will —of gifted individuals who lived their lives that way and made great contributions....

You also ignore the fact that even the kind of painting you do could not be done by anyone else, and contains within it the raw material of your own unique and natural experience with life, and no one else’s.

(Pause at 9:35.) Such ideas, then, prevent you from enjoying your own accomplishments, as you should more properly do, and from enjoying their growth through time, from the background that was your own. The same applies to Ruburt.

As a rule, psychics are not particularly good writers. He tries to view his own work through some idealized image of a psyche who is as gifted as he is as a writer, and also highly gifted in meeting the public, putting on performances, acting as a healer, as a prophet, and as an expert therapist all at once, and in so doing his own characteristics and natural abilities and inclinations become lost along the way.

Both of your minds are doing more than fulfilling their promises: they are being used to excellent capacity. Your emotional understanding has also deepened greatly through the years. This applies to both of you. Ruburt does beautifully with people, individually and with groups—particularly for someone who is (underlined) largely so given to solitary work.

(Pause.) Today’s mail shows of course the better side of your readership, letters from people in many walks of life who are not fanatics, but who are normal individuals who recognize quality and who are seeking it. You are changing their lives, or allowing them to do so, of course, helping them release their own abilities—accomplishments that should be considered in line, again, with your own backgrounds, and not compared with hypothetical ones.

This is all apart from the considerable accomplishment of holding your own in the society while doing your own things, and in achieving a good deal of freedom in that regard. Your psychological growth is not something you can look at in the mirror, yet it is that growth that is also responsible for your painting and writing Ruburt’s books and his connections with me. In a fashion Ruburt’s symptoms are caused because he tries to understand his abilities and his life in a too-limited context, with definitions still too narrow. We are trying to broaden those definitions.