“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

DELETED SESSION

(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.

(“I don’t know whether you’re going to get it from me or Seth,” Jane said at 3:05 PM. “Earlier I felt the stuff around from Seth, but also from me too,” she said. “But I don’t know. I’ll let you know....” Then at 3:10: “I guess you’re gonna get a session after all. I feel him around, but it won’t be too long.” I made her coffee, and she sipped at it as we waited. The afternoon was dark, wet, and quiet. I was all for anything that could help her.

(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.

When you overwork the idea of responsibility—or service to the world—you erode that pleasure. All in all an excellent session, of course.

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.

If those abilities did lie in other directions, he would have felt strong impulses to hold sessions on the behalf of others, and would long ago have taken that course, so here again there are misunderstandings.

(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.