“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.

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.

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.

(10:12.) What I am saying, again, is quite apart from your having regular working hours, but you would do far better to choose another word than “work.” Your intuitive hours, perhaps, or your creative hours—even better—for in that kind of atmosphere the greatest works would result.

(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.

(10:18.) Now: Ruburt’s body is responding far more than either of you presently realize, and this is because in that regard Ruburt’s beliefs have been changing at a fast rate. Here the ideas of responsibility also have some application. He does not have a responsibility to sit constantly at his table, as if creative ideas could only find him there. This does not mean, again, that there is anything wrong with his sitting at his table five hours steadily if he wants to, but that he must loosen his beliefs about work and responsibility.

Besides this, however, there are certain other elements working along with the Seven books.

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.