“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt’s reading in college, and his friends there, led him to believe that the artistically gifted were not too well equipped to handle normal living. He thought they were fascinating, charming, self-destructive, and wasted most of their time in emotional and sexual excursions leading nowhere. He was determined not to fall into that trap. He did not realize that the people he knew — Nelson Hayes, for example, and Mauzet—were not basically artists, in this case writers. They would never write the books they talked about. But he made his judgment.

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.

Your purposes merged. You felt that you had to isolate yourselves to some extent from the world not because you wanted to, which would be all right; and to some extent you wanted to, but because you felt you must. You did not grant that others would understand your pursuits. Or if they did, you felt, they would not honor your intent.

Creativity has its own ebbs and flows. It uses time, but is not used by it. It is not regular as clockwork. It takes time to paint or write, but the great inspirations of painting and writing transcend time, and the feeling of freedom and exuberance can give you in a few hours creative inspirations that have nothing to do with the time involved.

The Spanish connection is important not because of Spain, but because of its international implications: the newer, broader field of your own thought. A small clue in a larger pattern, that your name and works are beginning to pop up more and more in other countries a ripple in an ever-increasing area of activity.

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.)

His intent in Framework 2 was so clear that his creative spontaneity was retained to a large degree despite the blankets he threw upon it. He equated, again, the writer or poet as highly gifted but emotionally not stable, so that he thought he had to set himself against his own nature in order to produce.

This is bound to inhibit creative inspiration to some degree. He felt he needed financial freedom in order to work, but in those terms work was equated with the Protestant work ethics, where spontaneity was frowned upon. Artistic work will show its own regularity. It will find its own schedules, but your joint ideas of work hours were meant to fit in with a time-clock puncher’s mentality, and not your own.

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.

In Framework 2, your writing abilities were also known, of course, and they continue to develop, continue to seek for outlet, continue to search for a pattern; despite your relative abandonment of them, they came to the fore. It may not seem so, but only your ideas of time, and not time itself, relatively closes your mind to the idea of a book of your own. For once stated, that desire —which is a desire—would lead to insights and inspirations that would collect in odd hours, scribbled down in a few moments, that would lead quite easily to a finished product.

(11:29.) If he feels like a nap, there is a reason for it. He may not be relaxed enough of mind so that that particular nap yields what it is supposed to; then he becomes angry for the lost time. He is afraid that if he trusts himself he will not work the proper number of hours. That is what you have taught each other, as if your natural drives and abilities would not automatically seek their own expression within time, but must be forced to do so.