“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At its very heart, creativity of that nature is indeed both sacred and highly useful, and from that dimension of activity all of the initial patterns (underlined) for your highly technological society have come. Your society has emphasized and exaggerated the objective characteristics of life to such an extent, however, that art seems to be an esthetic, fairly remote phenomenon, quite divorced from physical time. It might delight the eye as decoration, or cover a blank spot upon the wall.

Now: in a fashion, for the sake of this discussion (underlined), the blacks as slaves partially represented the great creative, exuberant, unattached, unconscious powers that were to be restrained, at least for a while. Their belief in dreams, love of music and song, even a certain mystical feeling of connection with the land—these elements were allowed the Negroes only because they were not considered fully human. White men and women were not supposed to act like that.

(10:12.) If men were considered equal, however, the ideas of Darwin and Freud came along to alter the meaning of equality, for men were not equal in honor and integrity and creativity—or heroism: —they were equal in dishonor (louder), selfishness, greed, and equally endowed with a killer instinct that now was seen to be a natural characteristic from man’s biological past.

In many past societies, soothsayers, dream experts, poets and artists were the most revered members, for they constantly replenished man’s creative abilities, allowed him to see his position within society and in the natural world with fresh eyes. He, or she, helped form the pattern for the society’s future developments, for its growth, for its give-and-take with nature.

(Pause at 10:22.) Because many people do realize that important contribution, you are financially secure. In that larger framework of activity, your creativity is being rewarded (still intently). Then what an outrage do you work against yourself when you try to justify your position in terms of money or worth according to the most parochial limits and social expectations of your time.

(10:30.) Give us a moment.... To some extent you felt you had to prove your worth as a conventional male, in—if you will forgive me—the narrowest of parochial terms, though you were possessed of abilities that were considered conventionally male only if they could be suitably laundered: art turned into commercial work, and other creative abilities, such as your writing, that at one time could have turned into several fields—the writing of Westerns, even. You felt the ordinary male accomplishments in terms of sports, which brought instant approval, yet you did not choose that road.

Now you can drop such nonsense, and realize that often both of you have fought paper dragons. The same applies to Ruburt’s bouts with “work,” sometimes directly opposed to his ideas of creativity. He has to be “working” all the time, so people will see he is not just a dumb housewife. (I laughed.)