“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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

The natural person is indeed the magical person, and you have both to some extent had very recent examples of such activity. You were, and are, trying to teach yourselves something. This is somewhat lengthy to unravel, but your behavior and experience, of course, is the result of your beliefs. Framework 2² has been a rather fascinating but mainly (underlined) hypothetical framework, in that neither of you have really been able to put it to any perceivable use in your terms. This is not to say it has not been operating. You have not had the kind of feedback, however, that you want.

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.

Some of Ruburt’s notes that you have not seen have further important insights as to such activity. The main point is indeed the importance of accepting (underlined) a different kind of overall orientation — one that is indeed not any secondary adjunct, but a basic part of human nature. As your own and Ruburt’s notes state, Ruburt’s more clearly, this involves an entirely different relationship of the self you know with time. You can make your own connections here, as per Ruburt’s camera experience, and your own dreams of late.

Important misunderstandings involving time have been in a large measure responsible for many of Ruburt’s difficulties, and also of your own, though they have been of a lesser nature. All of this involves relating to reality in a more natural, and therefore magical, fashion. There is certainly a kind of natural physical time in your experience, and in the experience of any creature. It involves the rhythm of the seasons — the days and nights and tides and so forth. In the light of that kind of physical time, which is involved within earthly biology, there is no (pause) basic cultural time. That is, to this natural rhythm you have culturally added the idea of clocks, moments and hours and so forth, which you have transposed over nature’s rhythms.

Ruburt culturally has felt, for many reasons that have been discussed, that each moment must be devoted to work. You have to some extent felt the same. I said that the artistic creator operates in the time of the seasons and so forth, in a kind of natural time — but that natural time is far different than you suppose. Far richer, and it turns inward and outward and backward and forward upon itself.

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.

You have not really, either of you, been ready to drastically alter your orientations, but you are approaching that threshold. As Ruburt’s notes also mention, the “magical approach” means that you actually change your methods of dealing with problems, achieving goals, and satisfying means. You change over to the methods of the natural person. They are indeed, then, a part of your private experience. They are not esoteric methods, but you must be convinced that they are the natural methods by which man is meant to handle his problems and approach his challenges.

I use the word “methods” because you understand it, but actually we are speaking about an approach to life, a magical or natural approach to life that is man’s version of the animal’s natural instinctive behavior in the universe.

It certainly seems that the best way to get specific answers is to ask specific questions, and the rational mind thinks first of all of something like a list of questions. In that regard, Ruburt’s response before such a session is natural, and to an extent magical, because he knows that no matter what he has been taught, he must to some degree (underlined) forget the questions and the mood that accompanies them with one level of his consciousness, in order to create the proper kind of atmosphere at another level of consciousness — an atmosphere that allows the answers to come even though they may be presented in a different way than that expected by the rational mind.

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.

The natural person is anything but irrational. It gathers all of experience together and transforms it, so many of your problems have been caused by applying the wrong kind of orientation to your lives and activities.

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.

The old beliefs, of course, and the rational approach, are everywhere reinforced, and so it does indeed have a great weight. The magical approach has far greater weight, if you use it and allow yourselves to operate in that fashion, for it has the weight of your basic natural orientation. The rational approach is the superimposed one. I think that you are both ready to understand that.

4. I had just finished typing the manuscript for Jane/Seth’s The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, and Jane had just finished typing the manuscript for her own God of Jane. Prentice-Hall published both books.