“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Pause.) For many years you both pursued your arts despite living amidst such cultural beliefs. The pursuit of art was considered egotistical in a negative meaning of the word—selfish, childish or adolescent, and indeed many psychologists of the recent past considered it in the light of prolonged adolescence, or saw it as a sign of the individuals’ refusal to fully accept an adult role in life.

(Long pause.) In an industrialized society, people were trained to fit into assembly line productions. The imagination was itself considered suspect. It was felt that creativity served no responsible end in society. Again, you both pursued your own courses nevertheless. You did so, however, in the light of that psychological climate, so that while you went your own ways you also reacted to the social environment: you tried to show other people that you were indeed responsible—more, that you worked (underlined) not only as hard as others, but often harder (underlined).

Now art itself functions in a different manner. First of all, the artist in whatever medium loves the activity for itself, and everything else is basically (underlined) secondary. You have a love of pleasure, focused into a certain magical kind of creativity. (Long pause.) This love and this pleasure automatically put the individual in harmony with the nature of existence itself, for existence operates in the same manner.

Ruburt saddled himself with a feeling of responsibility, however. At the same time of course he naturally resented such dictates. They tempered his own inspiration, narrowed his spontaneity. The idea of that kind of responsibility is extremely persuasive, however, in your society. (Long pause.) Because women were somehow regarded as less responsible than males, more easily given to frivolity, Ruburt also tried even harder to insure that he was acting in a responsible way.

The body itself is designed for pleasure. Value fulfillment seeks out pleasure. The entire idea of free will involves the making of choices between various gradations of pleasurable behavior. Value fulfillment even with the animals insists upon a qualitative enjoyment of life’s existence—one that automatically fosters a loving cooperation with the rest of nature as the individual follows impulses toward various kinds of pleasures. But the word pleasure often has a negative connotation to official morality. (Long pause.) If you follow the pursuit of pleasure in this creative manner, then you will automatically begin to discard faulty concepts of responsibility.

(Long pause.) Pleasure implies play as well, of course, and art involves a kind of high free play—an extension of it that cannot be tied to personal or to mass need. High play of that nature opens doors of excellence that responsibility alone can never touch, and results in far more valuable help to the world as a natural by-product than any self-determined behavior can, so these are the ideas that we want to stress, both in bodily terms and in psychic and creative ones, and Ruburt is beginning to understand some of that now. The idea of creative play—and in those terms of a certain kind of abandonment—should be encouraged; the kind of abandonment a child feels when playing a game, in which it identifies with pleasurable activity. It therefore joins with its own unconscious processes, and those processes are connected more intimately with the very source of its being.