“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

A good deal of what I will say explains the morning episodes. Since I am dealing with this particular area I will not include other issues. For the book he was exploring creativity and other ideas of work and play. Long ago you first used the word “work” in reference to your painting, and to Ruburt’s writing. In the material given and given, the reasons are there as to why he latched onto some of your ideas—so I will not go into those here.

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.

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.

A note: in creativity play and work are invisibly entwined. In your society however work often implies something you have to do, a chore that must be performed for monetary reasons. With Ruburt the play-work elements that had once been together became separated; from play-work to work-play, and occasionally the combination simply became work.

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.

I am pulling an Oversoul Seven on you, but I am gong to give you an idea for a painting, in the next three days, waking or sleeping—I will not tell you which—but I want you to be playfully alert to it. When you were doing commercial art you were utilizing some important aspects of creativity, though you were not matured enough to use them except in limited form.

You could work with nature despite what you think of as distractions, so examine your own beliefs about playful creativity and work.