“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.

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.

The trance itself had feminine connotations, though he conveniently forgot [several excellent male mediums]. And yet at the same time he was afraid of exerting power, for fear it would be thought that he was usurping male prerogatives.

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.”

The art of the old masters escaped such connotations, largely because it involved so much physical labor — the making of colors, canvases, and so forth. That work, providing the artist’s preparation, now belongs to the male-world manufacturer, you see, so as a male in your society the artist is often left with what he thinks of as art’s feminine basis, where it must be confronted, of course.

Indeed, these are some of the reasons why Ruburt distrusted the spontaneous self: because it was feminine, he believed, and therefore more flawed than the spontaneous self of the male.

(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.