“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

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.

(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.

Now: creativity is basically a mental proposition, a mental or psychic activity. It is also, like physical exercise, an energizing phenomena, one that expands and extends the mental and psychic properties as surely as physical exercise develops the body’s being. (Pause.) What you are dealing with, then, in creativity is a continuing kind of psychic play, an activity that probes into the nature of inner reality and explores it with as much sheer vitality as that with which the child explores physical reality. The child runs, falls down, skips, spins, climbs, swings, tries out its body in as many ways as possible, and naturally explores the body’s relationship with its environment. Then the child explores the environment itself.

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.

(Long pause.) As a child, with no preconceived ideas in normal terms, you drew and wrote stories. Ruburt wrote stories or poems, and drew. The natural impulses were allowed their free play. Later you believed that artists should be artists. The concentration in painting should be so intense—should be—that there would be no thought of any other occupation. The concerns of the world, its progress or lack of it, the nature of existence—none of those issues would interfere with such an artistic vision.

They often worked by choice with a multitude of workmen, apprentices, students, hangers-on and whatever. For all of Michelangelo’s ranting, he found great zest in the political tumult of his time, in which he was of course quite intimately involved. He played church and state against each other, made an ass of the Pope whenever he could, and was deeply involved in the social, political, and religious fervor of those days.

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.

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.

When you are writing your mind is also playing with images. When you are painting your mind is also building ideas. Forget the old idea of exclusive expression.

This session should be of excellent use, really, to both of you—and remembering the playful nature of creativity will help Ruburt get back to his book. He does that by forgetting the book, and playing with the ideas that it contains.