“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Neither of us had questions for Seth in particular. That is, I said, “I could ask 5,000 questions, but I haven’t planned any for tonight.” Jane said we could have “just a question-and-answer Seth book”—one made up of just those ingredients, without the formal session format. “But the publisher would want it organized according to subject matter, or presented in some orderly way,” I replied, whereupon she wrinkled her face at the work this might involve: “But you could do all that after we got the material....”

(Actually, this evening’s session grew out of several insights Jane had given voice to in recent days, and osme relaxation effects that had followed several of those. “But right now I’m just waiting,” she said impatiently at 9:40 PM, after we’d been sitting since 9:25 or so. “It makes me so mad. Here I was all set to go earlier.” Then she amended: “It makes me mad because I feel like I’m in an odd in-between subjective state. It isn’t comfortable—I want to be one thing or the other, maybe....”

(Finally, rather slowly but, strangely, with emphasis:)

Now, creativity has always been the species’ closest connection with its own source, with the nature of its own being. Through creativity the species senses All That Is. Creativity goes by a different set of rules, however. It defies categories, and it insists upon the evidence of feeling. It is a source of revelation and inspiration—but revelation and inspiration do not initially deal with power, but with knowing. So what happens often in your society when men or women have creative bents, and good minds to boot?

Ruburt was highly creative, and so following the beliefs of his time, he believed that he must watch his creativity most carefully, for he was determined to use it. He decided early to have no children—but more, to fight any evidence of femininity that might taint his work, or jumble up his dedication to it. He loved you deeply, and does, but he always felt he had to tread a slender line, so as to satisfy the various needs and beliefs that you both had to one extent or another, and those you felt society possessed.

Now: you are creative, but you are a male—and one part of you considered creativity a feminine-like characteristic. If it were tied to money-making, as it once was, then painting became also power-making, and hence acceptable to your American malehood; and I am quite aware of the fact that both of you were, by the standards of your times, quite liberal, more the pity. You would not take your art to the marketplace after you left commercial work, because then, in a manner of speaking now, understand, you considered that the act of a prostitute, for your “feminine feelings” that you felt produced the painting would then be sold for the sake of “the male’s role as provider and bringer of power.”

(10:35 PM. Jane’s trances and delivery had been good. “I didn’t know he was going to do that,” she said after I told her it was an excellent session. “Maybe that’s why I felt so uncomfortable before the session. Now I feel exhausted. I could go right to bed, but I won’t....”

(Jane said she couldn’t really describe them now, but she had “great emotional feelings” when she delivered the part of the session about my thinking that selling work made me a prostitute. “Some gargantuan feelings there, full of humor,” she said.

(She laughed. “You are so strange,” she said. “Here you won’t go to the marketplace, but you think of saving all of these private sessions for posterity, to give them to the world. You’re very close-mouthed: you don’t blab our personal business, as you put it, but you’d do that.... Instead, I see us when I’m 80 and you’re 90, out in the backyard, burning it all.”