“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(See the copy attached of my dream of this morning. To my surprise the dream led to this session. I typed it as soon as I got up, and Jane read it at the breakfast table. As we discussed the dream I began to make connections on my own about my early days in NY City with Ralph Ramstad, as well as about commercial art, my parents, doing illustration, and so forth. I explained these items to Jane in some detail.

In the next scene, you have the introduction of the artistic ability, however, personified by your friend of your younger New York artistic past. He represents someone highly gifted artistically, and therefore stands for your artistic self as you might have idealized it when you knew that young man. When he tries to put on ordinary working clothes, however, something happens: the shorts keep changing into a Turkish towel, and harder he tries to pull the pants on the more and more they change, until there is no mistaking that the shorts simply will not do.

Some of this has to do with the complicated nature of creativity itself, and with the contradictions that seem to exist at certain levels. Your kind of creativity has always been together and jointly of a private nature—so much so that you do not even like to work in rooms too close to each other. You have often thought of living under more isolated surroundings. Ruburt has been fascinated at times by the idea of working nights, his ways of assuring such isolation. You began to accumulate some ideas of a different nature, wondering more about your responsibilities to the world as adults, wondering how “useful” art should be in the world.

(Long pause.) You kept your own studio apart, say, from the house’s living areas. The whole nature of your independent and joint creativity involved a retreat from the world that you both enjoyed, followed by, in the case of books, an expression in the world—in which, however, the books appeared in your stead: a way of life that involved usual publicity—lectures and so forth—seemed to threaten that kind of existence to Ruburt, in which he feared expression itself would be diverted, simplified, so that the message that finally did get through would not be the same message at all as the original one. Yet still, because of misunderstandings and old beliefs, he still felt a responsibility to act otherwise, a social pressure to do so. (All intently.)

(Long pause.) End of session, except to remind you that the dream message also reflects material that I have been giving you concerning creativity and the stressing of pleasure above responsibility. You paint because it gives you pleasure initially. You have the sessions together and you do the notes primarily because these endeavors bring you pleasure. They exercise your curiosity, creativity, and sense of exploration.

I will certainly. Overall, I do agree, however, that our sessions ideally should not be tied to utility as a primary consideration, but should be freed of such considerations, at least generally speaking, so that their full potential can be expressed. A potential that belongs to all of art, whatever its nature, since it is daring enough, free enough to fly ahead of man’s needs at any given time, and to create a new atmosphere that transforms the nature of being itself.

(“The same thing,” I said. “It all basically has to do with this idea of responsibility. If you can get rid of that you might be home free. If it was up to me, I’d throw the idea of responsibility down the hillside and into the river.”

(“You’d be free to do anything you want to,” I said. “The idea is you’d be free to do as you please. You could answer it, or any part of it, as you wanted to.... Wouldn’t it be a scream if a relatively innocuous-seeming dream like that one marked the turning point in this thing?” Indeed.

(I added that I thought I was already doing, at least to some extent, what Seth advocated in the session—throwing away any sense of responsibility or financial reward in painting, at this time at least. I trusted that whatever might result from the painting would be beneficial in various ways, possibly including the financial if the need arose. I explained to Jane that I’d reached the point in the last year where I just couldn’t let anything interfere with the act of painting itself—and that I thought she needed an attitude like that in regard to her own work very badly. I could have said [in retrospect] that my attitude stemmed at least to a large degree from my watching her struggle with her own hang-ups. Not that I didn’t think I’d reach it on my own anyhow.

(“I’d sacrifice every cent we’ve got if it would get us that,” I said, “because then we’d both be free. I’d sacrifice this house and live in a cheap apartment on Water Street again, if it would help, and we just had royalty money to live on.” The other day I’d told her we had enough money to live for at least five years—and more—without earning anything, and I said it again now. “The funny thing is, if we were that free yet committed, we wouldn’t have to worry about money because we’d automatically do the right things that would get us more whenever we needed it, just by doing the things we love to do....”