“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

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 instances of Framework 2 activity as you become aware of them will show you the true nature of creativity, and acquaint you with the mental feeling of freedom and spontaneity. You have not understood the connections between your work and your life. A problem in a painting or in a book might be solved through an hour’s lovemaking, for often what might seem to be a problem of technique is, as you are beginning to understand, an emotional equation instead. None of your impulses are meaningless. You cannot separate your work from your life. Spontaneity as you understand it now, in the light of your knowledge, can only add to your work, for it is not meaningless license, nor is it composed of impulses contrary to your work.

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.

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.

(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.