“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Nature realizes that there is no such thing as waste. This statement applies also to your earlier questions this evening about the sperm. Nothing in the stream of life is wasted, and everything, whether in your system of reality or not, is in the stream of life. You were born in the Depression, Ruburt shortly thereafter. Thrift was a necessity in those times. There were great contrasts in that period, however—deprivation, severest economic conditions, a spareness of attitude, set off by the greatest criminal activity, the wildest of parties. People broke the prohibition laws who never drank before, and did not like to drink. The ideas of thrift and the puritan attitudes were not the result of the Depression, but helped cause it.

In your society talent, even genius, tries to ally itself, at least for a while, with your economic needs, for if the body does not eat the abilities will not survive. Left alone, the abilities will see to it that economic survival is achieved. It will see to abundance, and not in a self-serving manner but as a leaf seeks sunlight. Am I going too fast?

Then however the abilities want to grow and thrive, and the economic factors must no longer be a prime incentive. If they are there will be difficulty. The personality will try to develop its abilities further in a freer, more mature fashion, but the old habits will hold the personality back. “Will this sell or won’t it?” That question was more or less imperative when Ruburt was learning to use his abilities. Not only that, but the economic need itself was important, helping to focus those abilities to some degree, to the needs and desires of others as well as himself.

Plants also need water beside sunlight. Let us say for our analogy that water provides the free-flowing motion of ideas circulating through the psyche freely. It is as if Ruburt said “Aha, I must have the sun, or economic security, so my abilities can grow,” and became so concerned about that that he forgot the need for watering.

When I say economy however I am not simply speaking of economics in financial terms—rather in the larger meaning of economy in sparing down, cutting out nonessentials, fearing to waste not simply money, but energy or time. All of these ideas are based upon the fear that an individual possesses only so much energy that must be hoarded, directed—not easily, but with fantastic force. The clothes dryer in the basement represents energy that you are afraid to use. You realize you have the money to run the machine, or to buy the washer. It seems somehow sinful, however, wasteful and wrong.

Ruburt has been trying to be economical in terms of money, energy and time. He differed from you only in that he carried your own ideas and his further in certain respects. In others, financially for example, he broke away first and you followed. The idea of the spare, poor young artist or writer, living romantically in a garret or poor apartment, has served as a handy self-image for many in their early years, providing a sense of dignity that enabled such apprentices to make their way. You chose the circumstances. You purposely chose a time involved in which writers and artists had it “hard”—so you cannot turn around then and blame the society. You each wanted to be apart from it to some extent. You (RFB) proved to yourself that your art could support you when you were young. You made good money. Then you immediately disentangled your abilities from economics in a particular fashion. You used your dexterity in “artistic” ways in your jobs—but the bulk of your artistic yearnings were divorced completely from the world at large. Ruburt did not know that his abilities could ever bring him money.

When you worked in an art department, even though you knew you were doing “commercial work,” society referred to you as an artist. You had a certain prestige. When Ruburt needed jobs he worked in a factory, or he was a sales clerk or a door-to-door sales person—jobs he felt that gave him no prestige. He was afraid, however, of such jobs—prestigious ones—for fear the need for money would lead him to neglect his work. He became more economical.

For some time in the past, I grant you, you each considered sex uneconomical in terms of time and energy. Rather than avail yourselves of its great refreshment, you thought of the time taken from your work, each of you; beside this Ruburt feared pregnancy, seeing a child not as any kind of fulfillment, but as an artistic and economic disaster.

There is nothing strange in the fact that Ruburt begins to have sexual feelings as the muscles begin to feel toward flexibility (legs). His physical difficulty has involved then his ideas of economical action—the cutting out of waste. These ideas, again, are a part of the one line of consciousness that says “You have only so much energy and so much time. You must therefore ‘use’ time and energy well; practically you must not waste time or effort. If you have a purpose and you want to achieve it badly enough, then everything else must be sacrificed for it—because “time marches on.” “Time is money.”

Tell Ruburt that even in the old terms it is not economical to take such an amount of time for simple movements to the bathroom, for example. He holds his urine as he holds his breath, hardly taking time to breathe. This is not creative action, or productive action, as he is now with your help beginning to realize.