“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.

(Pause.) He considered himself to be excellent at his work. It gave him a professional respectability, a feeling of worth and merit. He found it—his occupation—to be a responsible one, befitting an adult. The occupation filled many of his needs and expressed some of his abilities. In his spare time, however, for a lark, simply because he wanted to, he wrote his Alice in Wonderland—a book that is a masterpiece at many levels. What a shock when he discovered that the world was ignoring what he thought to be his important contribution to mathematics. He believed (underlined) that he should devote all of his time to his work, and could hardly forgive himself for his regrettable lapses into writing—and he was writing, after all, not even for adults, and not for young males either.

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.

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.

(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.

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.

You get what you concentrate upon.

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.