“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(9:15.) It learns that in a fashion sounds are “stacked” inside the mind before, say, words are spoken. (Pause.) That kind of mental and psychic expansion in one way or another constantly occurs. In conventional art you end up with a product on many such occasions—a book or painting or whatever—as you attempt to define in physical terms the reality of an inner existence with which you have always been familiar, and to leave in physical reality some evidence, however slight, of inner visions that flicker within all consciousness.

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.

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.

(9:59.) Think of yourself as a creative consciousness, capable of both a detailed and an extended, both a visual and a thoughtful, merged focus.