“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(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.

(Pause.) The creative product is a remnant, then, a glowing fragment of a larger sensed whole.

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.

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.

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.