“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Today Jane had been very upset because her control of time seemed so faulty that she wasn’t getting all the things done through the day that she wanted to accomplish—writing, exercises, seeing an occasional visitor, using the phone—whatever she might have wanted to do on any particular day. I’d had somewhat the same feelings today, having managed to “work” at painting for but a couple of hours this morning. The rest of my time had been devoted to chores, it seemed, and both of us felt the day had slipped by without our knowing it.

(Pause.) Time. It takes so much physical time to perform any given number of physical activities.

The physical act of writing itself takes time. Basically, however, creative acts, the acts of insight, intuition, of revelation, do not take time in the same fashion. They often appear suddenly. A moment’s insight, for example—a moment’s—might carry you in a flash where your intellect alone could not travel in years.

It might take you years, possibly, to thoroughly discuss all of the ramifications of that insight, but the original creation comes from Framework 2 into your time. Taking it for granted, again, that physical limitations of time exist. Nevertheless when you become overly concerned with the seeming shortness or lack of time, it is almost always because you have fallen back to conventional ideas: you have only so many moments in a day. But the conventional version says, really, that those are surface moments; that you, say, run from one to the next, as if time were a moving sidewalk with the past moment vanishing forever.

In that version of events you must indeed be very careful of “how you use time.” it seems that other people can steal your time away from you, prevent your use of creativity, when of course—literally, now—that is quite impossible.

No one can steal your time, or in any given moment prevent you from using your creativity. The belief, however, can certainly make that appear true.

In the first place, your intuitions are of course always working. Regular working hours can give you a time framework you need, in which those ideas can appear, but the ideas themselves, and the insights, often come to you particularly when you are not thinking of work. When you are doing any of a number of other things, encounters with others that often appear as distractions, are instead springboards for insights that you may not have had otherwise.

I am not saying that you should not have regular working hours. I am saying that you should change your beliefs concerning the nature of time and creativity—and for Ruburt, time, creativity, responsibility, and work. (Pause.) If you become more aware of those issues, the time that you have, all of it, will quite literally seem to expand. Ruburt in one moment is often mulling over and mentally arranging his time. Figuring out how he will get such-and-such done an hour or two hours from then—so he foreshortens the moment, in that it becomes far less full than it is capable of being for him.

Each physical moment is literally filled to the brim with the unceasing vitality of Framework 2. Regardless of what you are doing at any given time, the creative abilities are always active, and they seize upon the most mundane circumstances as well as the most profound, seeking to bring to the surface of consciousness the greater dimensions of awareness that are possible.

Ruburt has been thinking too much in terms of responsibility and work again. The attitude turns beloved projects into pursuits that must be performed along the surface of the moments. He has begun Seven, and so it must be finished (underlined), because, while he loves the book, he has begun to think of it as “work.” So poetry lately, again, does not fit in, for he must have a certain number of pages to show “that he has used his time properly.”

There is no way to use your time properly. Properly is not the way to use time (intently). Left alone, your creativity knows its own rhythms, and drinks at the springs of Framework 2 at its own delightful leisure. That delightful leisure, that “loafing of the soul,” from Ruburt’s Whitman—the poet—is what ends up producing the kind of great creative “works” that Ruburt searches for.

Framework 2 and its creativity takes advantage of your time—and will appear within it. But it operates according to the processes of association, and those processes dip in and out of time constantly.

(Amused:) I often break off book dictation also at certain times to help relieve Ruburt of feelings of responsibility, when he thinks that he should have book sessions because of the responsible work involved. Poetry, painting, and out-of-bodies are quite as much a part of his “work” as anything else he does. To some extent all of this applies to you also.

At the same time all of this is known. The impact of all of our books goes far beyond, for example, the numbers sold, and it is in both of your natures (with amused irony) to send forth into your worlds books that are in exuberant opposition to its mass beliefs—(much deeper) so you can hardly expect the readership of gothic novels. Even I am more realistic than that!

Particularly in the beginning, for all of your joint complaints about Prentice, Prentice was innovative. (With humor:) I believe that Sadat on television this evening said (louder) that it takes time for old ideas to change.

You are working for a peace treaty of a different nature. I am not putting down the species in any way, yet it is true to say that (pause) people who are beyond their time, or ahead of it, cannot expect most people to accept their ideas so readily.