“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I felt somewhat better this evening, although I still haven’t recovered fully from the “illness” I began experiencing on October 27. The last session, for November 6, has helped me considerably, and I reread it each morning. I’ve also resumed painting on a daily basis. I planned to resume work on Mass Events this week, but haven’t done so yet. At the moment I paint in the mornings, with an absolute trust growing out of the last session plus what I know and feel about Framework 2, and that’s it. I trust the rest will come. In the meantime I rake leaves in the early afternoon, write letters, and so forth. Right now I feel as far away from Mass Events as I did from painting when I wasn’t doing that.

He was, in a fashion only, sexually ambiguous, his mathematics expressing what he thought of as an acceptable male aspect while the artistic levels in his mind, now, he related to his feminine aspects. So he was to some extent a divided man. His creativity showed itself, however, when he allowed himself to play, when he forgot what he thought he should do, and did what he wanted to do.

(Pause.) Because of his beliefs he considered himself somewhat of a failure, and the rich, evocative nature of his own stories did not meet with the approval of his academically attuned mind. Despite himself, however, he was stretching the dimensions of his own consciousness, exercising his consciousness in different directions, expanding the scope of his abilities—and in so doing contributing a small masterpiece to the world.

(9:00.) I want here to stress the basic playful exercising aspects of creativity. When a child indulges in physical play, it exercises its muscles and its entire body. No one has to tell a child to play, for playing comes naturally. Playful games in childhood, not dictated by teachers or parents, often give clear indications of a child’s abilities and leanings. You can sense by watching a child’s play the future shape that his or her life can most productively take. The child does not consciously exercise his or her legs so that they will be strong, but simply joyfully follows the inner impulse to do so.

Beside this, the child, almost from its first moment of clear awareness, begins to play with its own consciousness, and in the same fashion. What can its thoughts do? Where can its thoughts go? Where do its thoughts go? How long can it hold a thought? And later—can a thought be held mentally as an object can be physically? Long before a child learns to place one playblock on top of another, it has already learned to mentally stack one thought upon another, so to speak.

Those sketches of his, it seems, do not stand up as creative products as a great sculpture might, but they stand for a truly creative originality in which a consciousness played with internal material, and projected outward many of the material properties that then simply did not exist. Much of his art in those terms did not show, but the art of his consciousness expanded beyond Michelangelo’s.

The creative products are important. They are physical landmarks of psychic and artistic inner journeys, but what you do with your consciousness, how you extend it, is even more important, for as physical play is meant to lead to a future physical body that is mature and fulfilled, so the creative nature of that kind of inner play leads to future extended consciousness, an inner being that is the mature version of an earlier self.

The inner creative man knows, as the child did, that the way will be cleared. There was Miss Bowman, there was art school and so forth—so I want you to remember that inner man. Social beliefs, beliefs from childhood or whatever are (underlined) overlays. They are superficial. They have unfortunate effects only when you do not trust the inner self.

When you do, your behavior is actually self-correcting, and if you understand that you will see that some behavior that appears contradictory is instead quite simply creative corrective activity. When you do not understand that, then you can become bewildered, thinking “Why did such-and-such work last week and not this week?”

As long as you feel, for example, that there is a conflict between your writing and your painting, then (underlined) you must somehow or other give each an equal-enough play, or you become upset. After your bout (of illness) I therefore suggested you go back to painting—which is important to you, and it is quite true that when you do not paint for a while you feel uneasy, and psychically out of balance. The feeling of competition between the two abilities operates in the other fashion, of course, so that if you have not been writing you feel the same unease.

You “were” right, then, when you worked on the book before your bout, and during that time you trusted yourself—but then your ideas of the comparative nature of your ideas intruded, triggered at that time by (news of) Crowder’s death, and the ensuing beliefs about the male role in society, and as that applied to your own talents. Left alone, ideally, you might have taken a week of joyful painting, during which time your mind refreshed itself, and new ideas about your notes accumulated. Telling you—or rather suggesting—that you paint simply put you on that course. Do you follow me?

But the conflicts can dissolve in a synthesis of understanding, in which case the problems do indeed vanish. End of session. You are free, then, to do as you prefer, if you realize that. I bid you a fond and hearty good evening.

(10:11 PM. Jane hadn’t felt like having the session, but had done excellently. I doubt if I’ve ever heard Seth do better. I think that already the material has helped. “I’m so glad,” she said. “I didn’t have a thing in my head.”)