“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I want to make a few comments. Generally speaking, creativity has feminine connotations in your society, while power has masculine connotations, and is largely thought of as destructive.

Your scientists are, generally now, intellectually oriented, believing in reason above the intuitions, taking it for granted that those qualities are opposites. They cannot imagine (pause) life’s “initial” creative source, for in their terms it would remind them of creativity’s feminine basis.

(Pause.) You must understand, I know, that the terms “male” and “female” here are being used as they are generally understood, and have nothing to do with the basic characteristics of either sex. In those terms, the male-oriented intellect wants to order the universe, name its parts, and so forth. It wants to ignore the creative aspects of the universe, however, which are everywhere apparent, and it first of all believes that it must divorce itself from any evidence of feeling. You have in your history then a male god of power and vengeance, who killed your enemies for you. You have a prejudiced god, who will, for example, slay the Egyptians and half of the Jews to retaliate against previous Egyptian cruelty. The male god is a god of power. He is not a god of creativity.

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?

(10:03.) The Catholic Church taught that revelation was dangerous. Intellectual and psychic obedience was much the safer road, and even the saints were slightly suspect. Women were inferiors, and in matters of religion and philosophy most of all, for there their creativity could be most disruptive. Women were considered hysterics, aliens to the world of intellectual thought, swayed instead by incomprehensible womanish emotions. Women were to be handled by wearing down their energies through childbirth.

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.”

(10:20.) I want to make it plain that such ideas are rampant in society, and are at the basis of many personal and national problems. They are behind large issues, involved in the [Three Mile Island] nuclear fiasco, for example, and in the scientist’s idea of power and creation. Both of you, highly creative, find your creativity in conflict with your ideas of sexuality, privately and in your stances with the world. Much of this is involved with the unfortunate myths about the creative person, who is not supposed to be able to deal with the world as well as others, whose idiosyncrasies are exaggerated, and whose very creativity, it is sometimes said, leads to suicide or depression. No wonder few numbers of creative people persist in the face of such unfortunate beliefs!

You run into many contradictions. God is supposed to be male. The soul is sometimes considered female. The angels are male. Now let us look at the Garden of Eden. The story says that Eve tempted the male, having him eat of the tree of good and evil, or the tree of knowledge. (Pause.) This represented a state of consciousness, the point at which the species began to think and feel for itself, when it approached a certain state of consciousness in which it dared exert its own creativity.

(Pause.) This is difficult to verbalize. (Pause.) It was a state when the species became aware of its own thoughts as its own thoughts, and became conscious of the self who thinks. That point released man’s creativity. In your terms, it was the product of the feminine intuitions (though, as you know, such intuitions belong to both sexes). When the [Biblical] passages were written, the species had come to various states of order, achieving certain powers and organizations, and it wanted to maintain the status quo. No more intuitive visions, no more changes, were wanted. Creativity was to follow certain definite roads, so the woman became the villain.

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.