“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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....”

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 the framework of this discussion, now, only, you have a male’s universe. It is a universe endowed with male characteristics as these appear in the male-female orientations of your history. The universe seems to have no meaning because the male “intellect” alone cannot discern meaning, since it must take nothing for granted. Even though certain characteristics of the universe are most apparent, they must be ignored.

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?

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.”

The art of the Old Masters escaped such connotations, largely because it involved so much physical labor—the making of colors, canvases, and so forth. That work, providing the artist’s preparation, now belongs to the male-world manufacturer, you see, so the artist as a male in your society is often left with what he thinks of as art’s feminine basis, where it must be confronted, of course.

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.

(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.