“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Generally speaking, large segments of your official society do not regard the pursuit of art as responsible behavior.

(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.

To some extent you convinced yourselves that such creative activity was indeed in some respects more work certainly than play. In your own art you worked relatively slowly, measured out your pleasure in a fashion, even thinking sometimes in the past that your talent required (underlined) periods of indecision and difficulty. Often you emphasized impediments. It seemed almost sacrilegious to think that the production of excellent art could involve fun—or worse, an active sense of irresponsibility, a joyful sense of ease, so that if a painting came too quickly you could not trust it.

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.

(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.