“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

That kind of enjoyment provides the child with a feeling for its own center. The child becomes self-directed as it learns to follow those pursuits that particularly increase its own individual sense of enjoyment and satisfaction. It might be important that the child learn to put off enjoyment for a period of time, to extend the period between desire and gratification (long pause). Such a period might include a training period, for example, where piano lessons might have to be taken before a concerto can be played.

Even then, however, the enjoyment of the act—in that case playing the piano—is paramount. The sense of enjoyment however does increase and extend individual abilities, and those impulses leading toward enjoyment are meant to serve each individual with a private inbuilt avenue of expression that will help center the person within himself, and within the world—and again, in such a way that both the self and the society are benefited.

(Long pause.) These issues are extremely vital in cases of creativity also, although they operate in all areas. The good parent, for example, is motivated by a sense of enjoyment and fulfillment, in which case his or her “responsibilities” are almost automatically reinforced and performed. People usually talk about what they should do only because they have forgotten how to remember what they want to do.

Ruburt did well today, and made the proper decisions finally, being much more aware of his own psychological mobility as his moods and his body statements changed. The idea of the letter was excellent, and represented your contribution (to Prentice-Hall). Your own difficulty with notes on our books or whatever comes mainly when you forget your own self-directedness and sense of enjoyment, and replace those with a sense of responsibility.

The overdone sense of responsibility can erode love and satisfaction. Ruburt “loved” to do housework at one time. Later his ideas of responsibility told him he should be working—not because he wanted to be working, but because he should be. At the same time those same worldly concerns led him to wonder about the validity of his own “messages”—and how responsible he was to the world for them—so the symptoms also served to give him a greater sense of caution, to temper creativity, for all the reasons stated in the Sinful-Self material.