“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The session really grew out of several insights that Jane herself has voiced since giving last Wednesday night’s book copy. Following several of those verbal comprehensions, she experienced very pleasant relaxation effects of the kind I described in the opening notes for the 829th session. “But right now I’m just waiting,” she said impatiently at 9:40, after we’d been ready for Seth to come through since 9:25. “Actually, I’m mad. Here I was all set to go earlier….” Then she amended her remarks: “It makes me mad because I feel like I’m in an odd in-between subjective state. It isn’t comfortable. I want to be Seth or myself — one thing or the other, maybe….”

(Then rather slowly — but, strangely, with emphasis:)

Now, creativity has always been the species’ closest connection with its own source, with the nature of its own being. Through creativity the species senses All That Is. Creativity goes by a different set of rules, however. It defies categories, and it insists upon the evidence of feeling. It is a source of revelation and inspiration — yet initially revelation and inspiration do not deal with power, but with knowing. So what often happens in your society when men and women have creative bents, and good minds to boot?

Ruburt (Jane) was highly creative, and so following the beliefs of his time, he believed that he must watch his creativity most carefully, for he was determined to use it. He decided early to have no children — but more, to fight any evidence of femininity that might taint his work, or jumble up his dedication to it. He loved you deeply and does, but he always felt he had to tread a slender line, so as to satisfy the various needs and beliefs that you both had to one extent or another, and those you felt society possessed. He was creative, and is. Yet he felt that women were inferior, and that his very abilities made him vulnerable, that he would be ridiculed by others, that women were not taken seriously as profound thinkers, or innovators in philosophical matters.

Now (to me): You are creative, but you are a male — and one part of you considered creativity a feminine-like characteristic. If it were tied to moneymaking, as it once was, then painting became also powermaking, and hence acceptable to your American malehood; and I am quite aware of the fact that by the standards of your times both of you were quite liberal, more the pity. You would not take your art to the marketplace after you left commercial work, because then, in a manner of speaking, now, understand, you considered that the act of a prostitute — for your “feminine feelings” that you felt produced the paintings would then be sold for the sake of “the male’s role as provider and bringer of power.”

I have given material on that before (but in private sessions). To some extent, Ruburt became afraid of his own creativity, and so did you. In Ruburt’s case the fear was greater, until it seemed sometimes that if he succeeded in his work he would do so at some peril: You might be put in an unpleasant light, or he might become a fanatic, displaying those despicable, feminine hysterical qualities.

(10:35 P.M. “I didn’t know he was going to go into all of that,” Jane said, after I’d told her she’d given an excellent session. “Maybe that’s why I felt so uncomfortable before the session: Part of me knew Seth was going to talk about us. Now I feel exhausted. I could go right to bed, but I won’t….”

(She couldn’t really describe them now, Jane said, but she’d had “great, hilarious, emotional feelings” when she delivered the part of the session about my thinking that selling paintings made me a prostitute. “Some gargantuan feelings there, full of humor,” she added.

(She laughed. “You’re so strange. Here you won’t go to the marketplace, but you think of saving all of these private sessions for posterity, to give them to the world some day. You’re very close-mouthed: You don’t blab our personal business, but you’d do that…. Instead, I see us when I’m 80 and you’re 90, out in the back yard, burning it all.”