“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You had highly conflicting ideas about “the world of working people” and the world of the artist. You both made many artificial divisions there, but over the years you became determined, both of you, to spend as much or more time at your work as our hypothetical working man in the factory.

In a manner of speaking, and in the terms of this discussion, you adapted the methods of the Protestant work ethics to your creative endeavors. Lest people decide that you were lax or lazy or irresponsible, you were determined to show that you not only worked as hard as they did, but harder. They might have vacations, but not you. They might quit at five, but not you. I am speaking here of you both. To some degree, you squeezed your exuberance into a tight fit, and tried to make a creative productivity regulate itself, to fit the industrial time clock: so many hours bringing a feeling of virtue, even if the attitude itself cut down on the exuberance of inspiration.

Ruburt as a woman took all precautions so that he would not be considered frivolous. The creative abilities do follow your conscious intents to some degree. One portion of you is not blind to the needs of other portions. The creative abilities are quite capable of helping your physical survival, economically speaking, when they are freely followed. To some degree you both decided that you would ration your freedom. You cannot ration freedom—you have it or you give it up.

What attitudes do you have that still linger? How do you communicate them to each other? You both want Ruburt to walk normally now, and you are seeing results in terms of body releases and improvements. In the past you have been in the habit of putting off “distractions” until this or that book was finished until you were sure that you could cope with freedom. If Ruburt were better completely tomorrow, would he suddenly want to disrupt the whole applecart before “Unknown” was finished, and go to Florida?

That question, with its implications, for I have simply taken one example of your fears, is to some extent in each of your minds. Can you handle the possibility of normal activity?—and I tell you that you can. The change of beliefs and feelings, the acceptance of freedom mentally, will vastly accelerate both of your creative abilities, releasing on both of your parts energy that has been withheld.

You both believed you had to fight to survive—particularly as artists—against the society; and Ruburt believed he must fight his own biology.

You have used your own abilities, both of you, and done well with them despite your overly protective attitudes toward them, and despite methods you used, Ruburt in particular, to insure their use. You cannot cut down physical freedom without inhibiting creative freedom, so to some extent Ruburt’s methods have inhibited his creativity. You cannot inhibit spontaneity in one area and not in another, but he did not get it properly through his head that spontaneity did not mean license, or that spontaneity was going to work against his work if he gave it half a chance. (Very intently.)

Left alone, you would both work many hours, but under completely different mental conditions. Left alone, you would both have altered your schedules simply because creative work enjoys variety. You would each have had periods where you worked nights for a while, and then days, or whatever, or when you began work at eight and worked until one in the morning. But you would have felt free to follow the inner scheduling.

I want Ruburt, again, to encourage spontaneity in all areas, and to trust that the spontaneity is the result of quite orderly sequences in Framework 2, and of larger patterns of creativity that are not yet consciously apparent. I want him to allow for greater physical spontaneity, to perform a physical act when he feels like it, and for greater psychic and creative spontaneity, both in his working hours and outside them; to concentrate on creativity, not time; for then you use time and it does not use you.