“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At lunch today I suggested to Jane that she put together a short book on the Frameworks 1 and 2 material Seth has given us since he introduced that concept in a private session last September 17, 1977. We’ve had 31 private or nonbook sessions since then, and a number of them contain information on Frameworks 1 and 2 — much of it relevant to that presented in Mass Events. I thought Jane might consider such a book project along with her other work. In a way the suggestion was my idea of trying to do something about Seth producing books within books, as I discussed in my opening notes for the 814th session; but Seth is so prolific that it seems we’ll never get all of his material published at this time.

Now: How nice that you remembered Framework 2 again.

To some extent the material on Frameworks 1 and 2 is of course an example of the entire idea, for you receive a good deal of information in sessions not given to book dictation — simply because, while our books are extremely free, still they must be colored by your ideas of what books are.

Even your concepts of creativity are necessarily influenced by Framework 1 thinking, of course, so our sessions do indeed follow a larger pattern than that, giving you certain perspectives from different angles in book dictation, and in other material. To some extent the larger creative pattern of the material, which does exist and is sensed, is nevertheless not directly perceived, for you are bound to perceive it piecemeal.

I have said that acts of creativity best approach the workings of Framework 2, for [those] acts always involve leaps of faith and inspiration, and the breaking of barriers.

When you are writing a regular book you draw upon associations, memories, and events that are known to you and others, that perhaps you had forgotten but that suddenly spring to mind in answer to your intent and following your associations. When an artist is painting a landscape, he might unconsciously compare hundreds of landscapes viewed in the past in multitudinous, seemingly forgotten hues that splashed upon the grass or trees, or as he seeks for a new creative combination. Art is his focus so that he draws from Framework 2 all of those pertinent data that are necessary for his painting. Not just technique is concerned, but the entire visual experience of his life.

Framework 2 involves a far vaster creative activity, in which your life is the art involved — and all [of the] ingredients for its success are there, available. When you are creating a product or a work of art, the results will have much to do with your ideas of what the product is, or what the work of art is — so your ideas about your life, or life itself, will also have much to do with your experience of it as a living art.

If you believe in the laws of cause and effect, as accepted, or in the laws of polarity, as accepted (and explained in a letter we received today), then you will be bound by those laws, for they will represent your artistic technique. You will believe that you must use them in order to, say, paint the living portrait of your life. You will therefore structure your experience, drawing to yourself from Framework 2 only that which fits. You will not have the “technique” to attract other experience, and as long as you stick with one technique your life-pictures will more or less have a certain monotony.

Again, the writer or the artist also brings more into his work than the simple ability to write or paint. In one way or another all of his experience is involved. When you pay attention to Framework 1 primarily, it is as if you have learned to write simple sentences with one word neatly before the other. You have not really learned true expression. In your life you are writing sentences like “See Tommy run.” Your mind is not really dealing with concepts but with the simple perception of objects, so that little imagination is involved. You can express the location of objects in space, and you can communicate to others in a similar fashion, confirming the physical, obvious properties that others also perceive.

In those terms, using our analogy, the recognition of Framework 2 would bring you from that point to the production of great art, where words served to express not only the seen but the unseen — not simply facts but feelings and emotions — and where the words themselves escaped their consecutive patterns, sending the emotions into realms that quite defied both space and time.

Give us a moment… Your world, then, is the result of a multidimensional creative venture, a work of art in terms almost impossible for you to presently understand, in which each person and creature, and each particle, plays a living part. Again, in Framework 2 each event is known, from the falling of a leaf to the falling of a star, from the smallest insect’s experience on a summer day to the horrendous murder of an individual on a city street. Those events each have their meaning in a larger pattern of activity. That pattern is not divorced from your reality, not thrust upon you, not apart from your experience. It often only seems to be because you so compartmentalize your own experience that you automatically separate yourself from such knowledge.

Your Framework 1 life is, again, based on the idea that you have only so much energy, that you will wear out, and that a certain expenditure of energy will produce a given amount of work — in other words, that applied effort of a certain kind will produce the best results. In the same way, it is believed that the energy of the universe will die out. All of this presupposes “the fact” that no new energy is inserted into the world. The source of the world would therefore seem no longer to exist, having worn itself out in the effort to produce physical phenomena. In the light of such thinking, Framework 2 would be an impossibility.

The greater life of each creature exists in that framework that “originally” gave it birth, and in a greater manner of speaking each creature, regardless of its age, is indeed being constantly reborn. I am couching all of this in terms of your world’s known reality, which means that I am dealing with the local properties of Framework 2 as they have impact in your experience.