“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.

(A note: This noon, Tuesday, I mailed to P/H Jane’s manuscript for James. She is now working on the epilogue.)

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.

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.

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.

In Framework 2 your abilities from birth seek their fulfillment, not at your expense, not despite your own best interests. Your biology, your abilities, your mind and your emotions, are not conflicting elements, one battling the others so that you must fight to attain your goals. In Framework 2, effortlessly all patterns are set into motion at your birth, opening up innumerable probable pathways, each leading to the best fulfillment of your potential, so that events, chance encounters, everything works together.

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.

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.

Spontaneity as you are aware of it represents the force of your being, with a full knowledge of your work and intents. It is the voice of inspiration, whether or not you recognize it as such. End of session, or take a break as you prefer.

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.

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.)

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.

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.