“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

To some extent, creativity involves you (pause) in a contradiction with the evidence of reality within your world. It puts you in a peculiar state of being—or in a peculiar relationship with the accepted world of factual evidence. The state of creativity can (underlined) be discussed as if it were (underlined) a separate state, like waking or sleeping. It can, in fact, involve waking dreams. In the usual awake state, in the terms now of this discussion, you deal with the available physical evidence of the world as it appears to present perception, that is, or with what you can see or feel or touch, either immediately or through physical instruments.

In the dream state you deal with objects that may or may not have a physical reality. You mix times and places, and the dream itself is a kind of completed act. Creativity allows you, while awake, to ignore or even to contradict what seems to be the hard evidence of known reality, either in large or small terms. The creative act involves you in a process whereby you bring from a mental dimension new events into the world that were not there before.

Ruburt may suddenly have an idea for a book. He wants to write it. In physical terms that book is not before his eyes. It has not been written, it has not been published. The evidence says physically that there is no such book. It is not a part of the world’s physical evidence. The idea for the book may come from a dream, or in that state of creativity where dreams reach toward physical actualization. Now Ruburt could say “I cannot write that book, or wonder how many pages it might have,” or think of the endless impediments that might prevent the book from being written. Instead, he simply ignores the physical evidence of the book’s absence, and creatively begins to write.

To some degree, creativity always involves a denial of life’s daily official evidence, for creativity deals with that which you are about to bring into being. You are quite aware of the absence which you intend to fill. Period. This applies obviously in the case of inventions. Creativity involves productive change.

(9:35.) In your painting, you are constantly involved with bringing some event into the world that was not there before. You fill the gap. You recognize the absence in the present of the physical painting you want to produce, and your creativity brings that painting into reality. With ideas, with our books, you deal, both of you, with such issues all the time. There is so much physical evidence in the world. It has been put together through the centuries, in your terms, in countless ways, bringing pictures of reality, each vivid, each contradicting the other to some extent. When man believed the world was flat, he used his thought processes in such a way that they had great difficulty in imagining any other kind of world, and read the evidence so that it fit the flat-world picture.

The world’s evidence, the objects, sensations, and so forth, should be respected and enjoyed. It should not be forgotten, however, that such evidence gives a composite picture—not only of patterns of perception, but of habits of perception.

I want you both to look at Ruburt’s physical condition in the light of what I have just said about creativity always contradicting the evidence to some degree. In your works, you both automatically have the courage, the daring, to allow creativity its way. To some extent, however, you are both still hypnotized by the evidence of Ruburt’s condition—where instead it should be used as a jumping-off board, as a gap to be filled with reality (emphatically). When you create you dream. Creativity, again, thrives on dreaming, and dreaming serves as a conduit for Framework 2’s activity. You do not concentrate on what stands in your way. You do not imagine impediments.

The lack of motion, however, in the last episode, was more noticeable, the constriction in the neck muscles and head. The situation there is as I have given in the past, and again, the problem is that you find yourselves confronted by “the evidence.” No one symptom exists by itself, but on an overall basis.

If you began to think in terms of beautifully produced books, without imagining impediments, then automatically the process would begin. You would be led to make proper suggestions, for example, ahead of time, or the creative process of someone in the art department would suddenly be stimulated to a new idea, or whatever. You would ignore any evidence to the contrary, except that you would recognize a gap to be creatively filled.

I meant to remark that the very late evening or predawn hours are indeed excellent times for creativity. Particularly since the minds of men and women (with humor)—are not so focused upon the physical evidence of the world, so that in a strange fashion the “burden” of that evidence is less, and there is some built-in advantage.