“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You had no social or cultural framework, then, ready-made for you to follow. Nor did you have any certainty that any self-imposed period of training and learning would succeed in leading you to your goals. In practical terms your goals were nebulous enough, in that there would be no degrees granted you, to say you had achieved them. You also had to survive economically.

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.

Ruburt as a woman took all precautions so that he would not be considered frivolous. The creative abilities do follow your conscious intents to some degree. One portion of you is not blind to the needs of other portions. The creative abilities are quite capable of helping your physical survival, economically speaking, when they are freely followed. To some degree you both decided that you would ration your freedom. You cannot ration freedom—you have it or you give it up.

What attitudes do you have that still linger? How do you communicate them to each other? You both want Ruburt to walk normally now, and you are seeing results in terms of body releases and improvements. In the past you have been in the habit of putting off “distractions” until this or that book was finished until you were sure that you could cope with freedom. If Ruburt were better completely tomorrow, would he suddenly want to disrupt the whole applecart before “Unknown” was finished, and go to Florida?

(10:13.) It has been withheld because you have not understood your creative natures. Your own are obviously not limited to art, per se, or art would have satisfied you so completely, and taken your attention so completely, that you would not have looked in other areas at all, so there is a place meant for you, in which your artistic—meaning painting—writing, and intellectual capacities form a synthesis in which all those abilities take part, and are fulfilled. Spontaneity knows its own order.

Your purposes merged. You felt that you had to isolate yourselves to some extent from the world not because you wanted to, which would be all right; and to some extent you wanted to, but because you felt you must. You did not grant that others would understand your pursuits. Or if they did, you felt, they would not honor your intent.

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.

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.

(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.