“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.

(As I said to Jane yesterday, now that I’m back painting it seems incredible that I ever left it—even though when I chose to concentrate upon Mass Events this summer I thought that was a good decision also. I still don’t see anything wrong with the decision, but evidently my body—my psyche—rather violently disagreed, considering the beliefs I must carry around with me.

(Jane said that she’d felt like having a session several times recently, but that obviously I didn’t since I’d fall asleep on the couch, and so forth. But tonight, when we wanted to have one to get back on the ball, she said she didn’t have any feeling for a session at all.

(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.

All children exercise, though relatively few end up, say, as specialists in sports, so the end result of such physical play is the future development of a healthy, strong body. The end result, then, is not a product, but a more completed kind of being.

Cézanne, as you know, was not a happy man. He could have been a far better artist still, for if his vision was intense, my dear friend, it was cramped, and it moved within itself in an agony to find a creative release that could never be found in the creative product alone, but in the psyche from which that product emerges.

That applies even more of course to Da Vinci, who was a social dilettante besides, but a man of incredible vision—a psychic if you prefer, who invented in his mind gadgets that would not physically come into your world for centuries.

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.

None of your abilities contradict each other, or oppose each other, or minimize each other, or in any way negate any of your probable accomplishments. They are meant to be creatively stacked, not just to be combined for example in conventional terms, but the abilities naturally are psychically merged. They mean that your own consciousness, as you think of it, has a slant, a potential, a rich combination a peculiar savored blend that is meant to be its own creative brew (very intently).

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.

Sometimes the advice I give you at any given time is meant to take the place of natural creative corrective behavior that ideally you would have taken on your own, but did not.

If you would try to see your own creative unity, then both your painting and your writing would give greater satisfaction, and become richer—your prose inspired by your imagery, and your painting by your ideas, so that both are sparked, producing not only products but a creative vision that sees reality through an extension that would be the natural art of consciousness, meant to blossom from those abilities.

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.”)