“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I want to make a few comments. Generally speaking, creativity has feminine connotations in your society, while power has masculine connotations, and is largely thought of as destructive.

Your scientists are generally, now, intellectually oriented, believing in reason above the intuitions, taking it for granted that those qualities are opposites. They cannot imagine (pause), life’s “initial” creative source, for in their terms it would remind them of creativity’s feminine basis.

In those terms, the male-oriented intellect wants to order the universe, name its parts, and so forth. It wants to ignore the creative aspects of the universe, however, which are everywhere apparent, and it first of all believes that it must divorce itself from any evidence of feeling. You have in your history then a male god of power and vengeance, who killed your enemies for you. You have a prejudiced god, who will for example slay the Egyptians on behalf of the Jews to retaliate against previous Egyptian cruelty. The male god is a god of power. He is not a god of creativity.

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?

(10:03.) The Catholic Church taught that revelation was dangerous. Intellectual and psychic obedience was much the safer road, and even the saints were slightly suspect. Women were inferiors, and in matters of religion and philosophy most of all, for there their creativity could be most disruptive. Women were considered hysterics, aliens to the world of intellectual thought, swayed instead by incomprehensible womanish emotions. She was to be handled by wearing down her energy through continual childbirth.

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.

He was creative, and is. Yet he felt that women were inferior, and that his very abilities made him vulnerable, that he would be ridiculed by others, that women were not taken seriously as profound thinkers, or innovators in philosophical matters.

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.”

Both of you, highly creative, find your creativity in conflict with your ideas of sexuality, privately and in your stance with the world. Much of this is involved with the unfortunate myths about this creative person, who is not supposed to be able to deal with the world as well as others, whose idiosyncrasies are exaggerated, and whose very creativity, it is sometimes said, leads to suicide or destruction. No wonder few numbers of creative people persist in the face of such unfortunate beliefs.

You run into many contradictions. God is supposed to be male. The soul is sometimes considered female. The angels are male. Now let us look at the Garden of Eden. The story says that Eve tempted the male, having him eat of the tree of good and evil, or the tree of knowledge. (Pause.) This represented a state of consciousness, the point at which the species began to think and feel for itself, when it approached a certain state of consciousness in which it dared exert its own creativity.

(Pause.) This is difficult to verbalize. (Pause.) It was a state when the species became aware of its own thoughts as its own thoughts, and became conscious of the self who thinks. That point released man’s creativity. In your terms, it was the product of the feminine intuitions (though, as you know, such intuitions belong to both sexes). When the passages were written, the species had come to various states of order, achieving certain powers and organizations, and it wanted to maintain the status quo. No more intuitive visions, no more changes, were wanted. Creativity was to follow certain definite roads, so the woman became the villain.

I have given material on that before. To some extent, then, Ruburt became afraid of his own creativity, and so did you. In Ruburt’s case the fear was greater, until it seemed sometimes that if he succeeded in his work he would succeed at some peril: you might be put in an unpleasant light, or he might become a fanatic, displaying those despicable, feminine hysterical qualities. (With much humor:) I hope this session benefits you both. End of session, and a fond good evening.