“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

The time that any artistic creator is involved with follows earth’s own time, however. The creator’s time rises out of the seasons and the tides, even though in your society you make a great effort to fit the creator’s time into what I will call assembly-line time. If you are a writer or an artist, then it seems that you must produce so many paintings or books or whatever as, say, an automobile worker must process so many pieces of the overall car chassis. Particularly if you want to make a living at your art, you fall into the frame of mind in which you think that “each minute is valuable” — but what you mean is that each minute must be a minute of production. But each moment must be valuable in itself, whatever you do with it.

(Pause.) There is much material here that I will give you, because it is important that you understand the different ways of relating to reality, and how those ways create the experienced events.

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.

What we will be discussing for several sessions, with your permission jointly — and, I hope, with your joint enthusiasm — will be the magical approach to reality, and to your private lives specifically, in order to create that kind of atmosphere in which the answers become experienced (underlined).

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.

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.

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.

I want it understood that we are indeed dealing with two entirely different approaches to reality and to solving problems — methods we will here call the rational method and the magical one. The rational approach works quite well in certain situations, such as mass production of goods, or in certain kinds of scientific measurements — but all in all the rational method, as it is understood and used, does not work as an overall approach to life, or in the solving of problems that involve subjective rather than objective measurements or calculations.

“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.”

“Any event, therefore, has an invisible thickness, a multidimensional basis. Your skies are filled with breezes, currents, clouds, sunlight, dust particles and so forth. The sky vaults above the entire planet. The invisible [vault of] Framework 2 contains endless patterns that change as, say, clouds do — that mix and merge to form your psychological climate. Thoughts have what we will for now term electromagnetic properties. In those terms your thoughts mix and match with others in Framework 2, creating mass patterns that form the overall psychological basis behind world events. Again, however, Framework 2 is not neutral, but automatically inclined toward what we will here term good or constructive developments. It is a growth medium. Constructive or ‘positive’ feelings or thoughts are more easily materialized than ‘negative’ ones because they are in keeping with Framework 2’s characteristics.”