“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(At 8:20 PM Jane called and asked whether she should have a session—she couldn’t make up her mind. I said I wanted more material on responsibility, that I wanted Seth to discuss it so it would help free her. “So I should have the session because it’s my responsibility to do it,” she said. “No,” I answered, “but it would be nice to have it in order to learn that your only responsibility is to get rid of the idea of responsibility. That’s all I care about.”

(Jane has felt somewhat better the last couple of days, and I’ve been hoping that what we’re learning is “responsible” for that improvement. I told her as we waited for the session that I was all for more material on the responsibility question, for I see it as the key to setting her free. I said also that her decision to give up doing publicity, made just recently, might be helping her feel better.

Years ago, Ruburt picked up that idea of work, applying it to creativity in his (underlined) own ways. You made it clear to others that while they be free, free on weekends or holidays, you yourselves were still involved with “work” (underlined)—all of this to show that you were responsible persons.

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.