“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(After supper we discussed various attitudes about work, art, writing, and other subjects that we’d held over the years. Time, money, and so forth. These subjects also show up in the session.

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.

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.