“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(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.

(I told Jane that the other day the pendulum had told me I hurt the rib as self-punishment because of my resentment of the visit of Tom D’Orio and friends. Whatever—both cases would involve time and interruptions, a threat to what I see as my main course in life these days, painting. And that threat would be the main cause behind my self-injury: guilt at feeling that way. My own bout with using the pendulum had been very brief.