“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

ASSEMBLY-LINE TIME VERSUS NATURAL, CREATIVE TIME. THE RATIONAL MIND VERSUS THE ARTISTIC MIND.

When you were both intensely involved in your projects, just finished, you let much of your inner experience slide, relatively speaking. The two of you operating together, however, then came up with an idea — an important one — that allows you to interpret the Framework 2 material in your own ways. You had instant feedback — the interplay of a creative nature between the two of you involving your dreams and the camera,³ and so forth. You were each struck by the magical ease with which you seemed, certainly, to perceive and act upon information — information that you did not even realize you possessed.

Being your own natural and magical self when you dream, you utilize information that is outside of the time context experienced by the so-called rational mind. The creative abilities operate in the same fashion, appearing within consecutive time, but with the main work done outside of it entirely. When you finished your project,⁴ you had several days of feeling miserable, but you caught yourself and turned yourself around beautifully, and you have every right to congratulate yourself in that regard.

The same thing happened to Ruburt, and to some extent, with some individual variations, the same causes were involved. When you were both working on those projects your cultural time was taken up in a way you found acceptable. Creative time and cultural time to some extent merged, in that you could see daily immediate evidence of creativity’s product, coming out of the typewriters, say, like any product off an assembly line. You were “using” time as your cultural training told you to do.

(9:25.) When the projects were done, particularly with Ruburt, there was still the cultural belief that time should be so used (underlined), that creativity must be directed and disciplined to fall into the proper time slots. In other words, to some extent or another he tried to use an assembly-line kind of time for your creative productivity. This may work when manuscripts are being typed, and so much physical labor is involved, but overall you are using the “wrong” approach to time, particularly for any creative artist. This again applies particularly to Ruburt, though you are not exonerated in that regard (with some humor.

(9:39.) Trying to fit the great thrust of creativity into assembly-line time is in itself bound to lead to conflicts, dissatisfactions, and frustrations. If the proper creative and magical orientation is kept primarily in mind, other things will fall into place. You do not say to the creative self, “Now it is 7:30. People are at their assembly lines. I am at my desk: produce.”

Assembly-line time does not really value time — only as time can be used for definite prescribed purposes. In that framework, to enjoy time becomes a weakness or a vice, and both of you to some extent have so considered time. With creative people strongly gifted, as in your cases, the natural person is very prominent, no matter what you do. It therefore strongly resents any basically meaningless constraints placed about its experience. It knows, for example, how to enjoy each day, how to collect creative insights from each and every encounter, how to enrich itself physically through household chores or other activities. It dislikes being told that it must work thus and so at command of unreasonable restraints.

I say wrong, meaning no moral judgment, but the application of one method to a pursuit that cannot be adequately expressed in such a fashion. The assembly-line time and the beliefs that go along with it have given you many benefits as a society, but it should not be forgotten that the entire framework was initially set up to cut down on impulses, creative thought, or any other activities that would lead to anything but the mindless repetition of one act after another (intently).

In other words, that entire framework is meant to give you a standardized, mass-produced version of reality. None of its concepts can (knocking the table) rationally be applied to creative endeavors. The orientation that gives you the creative achievement lies in the opposite direction.

Creativity itself has its own built-in discipline, the kind that, for example, in a dream can rummage through the days of the future to find precisely the data required to make a specific point.

At the same time the natural person did emerge. Ruburt followed his impulses and interpreted your dreams — all of which led you both into fresh creative activity. But it was not work, you see. What he needed to do was really relax, not prove that he could or should or must immediately begin another book. True creativity comes from enjoying the moments, which then fulfill themselves, and a part of the creative process is indeed the art of relaxation, the letting go, for that triggers magical activity, and that is what Ruburt must learn.

“Then, in a private session held on the evening of September 17, 1977, Seth came through with a very exciting concept called ‘Framework 1 and Framework 2.’ Jane and I were so struck by the practical, far-reaching implications of this proposition that we began a concerted effort to put it to use in daily life. Briefly and very simply, Seth maintains that Framework 2, or inner reality, contains the creative source from which we form all events, and that by the proper focusing of attention we can draw from that vast subjective medium everything we need for a constructive, positive life in Framework 1, or physical reality.”