“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

He worked an hour. You had lunch, and both returned after a short trip shopping. He took a shower instead of going directly to work, put food in the oven, worked another ½ hour, and yet found himself by dinner time with nearly ten pages of new material.

After dinner he wrote several more pages. Yet all in all he had worked a little over three hours. In the material he wrote there was information applied to himself, incomplete, but I will put it in order; and it has to do with the nature of creativity and his beliefs.

Some of the difficulty began when Ruburt started to connect writing with work. Remember his literal mind, and also that he does sometimes operate with extremes. Work was not play, then. It involved making money, definite hours, a routine and also adult status. He felt he needed that.

All of his ideas of responsibility became attached to the word “work.” In the past as given, he wanted to prove to you that he was working at home while you worked outside. Later when money became involved, then for a while fun writing had to come after working hours.

He tried desperately to schedule his highly creative productivity to fit that pattern. Whenever he had difficulty writing he would become more and more particular about his writing hours. He found that sometimes his so-called writing hours were not as productive as his after-hours writing. He loves to write at twilight, for example.

Sometimes after a full writing day, without too much actual creative production, he would do his best work in his free time after supper, when he did not have to work. So then he thought “I will schedule those hours into my writing day,” and suddenly they became prosaic, and often lost their magic because then they became his working hours.

Work means conforming to Ruburt. Work meant working hours like other people have. They should be over at a certain time. You often said that other people could relax after supper. Their work was done while you and Ruburt were still busy.

Ruburt’s normal “work periods” would often involve nonconventional hours, however, precisely because they were nonconventional. Each morning he felt it his duty to get up at a decent hour to go to work. At the same time artistic work had other connotations. Everything else was unimportant by contrast, so that other pursuits became taboo. If you went out in the day people knew you were not working. You early used the word “chores” for activities in which Ruburt took a childish delight. With his literal-mindedness, and for reasons given in the past, he also began to think of them as chores. Otherwise he would want to do them and not work.

Now I suggested the definite hours, knowing his position, knowing that he would begin to see that while any activity of course takes a certain amount of time, that his creative work will be judged not according to the hours spent on it but the yield.

This is what he is on the road to understanding. Anything that increases that yield is beneficial to his nature. Any given day a creative urge might span the day. At another time that creative surge might reach its peak in two hours, and deliver nuggets of creativity. His three-hour production today gave him more with a free attitude than five or six hours of determined application to “work.”

Now: When Ruburt’s high level of creativity happened to be strong enough to easily include five or six hours a day he improved, since his inspiration took as many hours as he thought his work should.

Inspiration and creativity he felt he could trust, but never felt he could trust his working capacity in the way he thought of work. At the same time other activities became taboo as not-work, so it was “wrong” to putter about the house in his work hours, and equally wrong to work after hours, when people who worked should be free.

Each day became a battle to turn play into work, structure it, and make it personally and socially acceptable. Yet creativity kept escaping the work definition—in my books, Seven and Sumari; and he even felt guilty about Sumari poetry in work hours, for it might not fulfill work’s requirements, produce money and so forth.

Your mother felt that his creativity was a threat to stability, so maintaining your own creativity stubbornly, you still felt to some degree that it was a threat, that it would not pay off, and so you tried to clothe it in the garb of work, effort, regular hours, and stability, and to deny or play down its playful aspects.

Your creature feelings toward night, dawn and dusk, have much more to do with inspiration, though a painting, once inspired, may then take so many hours to execute. But your idea of specific work time automatically divides that time according to your beliefs from other times when you may be shopping, or doing something else far divorced from work.