“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….”

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.

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?

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.

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.

(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.