“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The Protestant work ethics give you great technology sometimes. Sometimes they provide a backbone, an impetus, a direction, a framework, in which people not specifically gifted can find a place, sometimes. Protestant work ethics do not produce great art, and they can finally undo the good that they have done, by turning all work into a meaningless performance in which the product itself becomes a means to an end, and loses any esthetic value.

In that framework, you each found yourselves artistically gifted. While you went to art school, you recognized that in larger terms art cannot be taught, merely basic techniques. Ruburt recognized that no one can teach you to write. You could not therefore count on a series of well-known steps to bring you to your own, as a carpenter or a doctor, or a dentist (humorously) can.

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.

If you are a creator in those terms, you will use any society as a part of your medium. You think of a work of art as composed, say, of a theme or overall design, of various techniques and personal idiosyncrasies; and yet works of art, while transcending time, are indelibly impressed by the times also. A Rembrandt living today would be an entirely different Rembrandt, granted that he used his gifts fully.

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.

You began all of this out of natural intent, natural characteristics, natural leanings, because that is the way you are, naturally. Those abilities will naturally work in and through time, without force. You are not going to be interrupted that much. Your worries interrupt you far more, and those interruptions that do occur are often gift horses, providing in another form precisely what you need in your work at that time.