“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Last August Jane received a letter from Nelson Hayes, who was one of her professors at Skidmore. Actually, it was a note from him to Prentice-Hall, asking for review copies of the Seth books, and that his note be forwarded to Jane. He wanted her to write him. I kept the letter, finding it after it had been initially misplaced, feeling for some reason that Jane shouldn’t answer it at the time: I trusted my intuitions, then. This was before Seth began the Frameworks 1 and 2 material, I believe. Jane mentioned the note at various times, wondering what had happened to it.

(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.

The Protestant work ethics lack exuberance. The men who have succeeded within it, the inventors for example, never really fit within its confines. To a certain extent, of course, the impetus in an industrial society is upon throwaway achievement and mass-produced goods. A certain amount of time spent assembling a certain product, performing the same motions over and over on an assembly line, will at the end of a certain period give you a certain number of assembled items. Creativity is the one thing not needed, for the products are to be put together in a fairly regimented fashion.

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.

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.

(10:35–11:05.) If you are born into a time that does not seem conducive to your talents, it is because that society offers needed counterpoints to questions that concern you, or because it provides a particular kind of framework that will color your abilities in a certain direction, bringing out nuances or accomplishments not possible otherwise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

End of session. Read it together. Use it creatively, in time and out of it. My heartiest regards.