“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.

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.

(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.

(I would like to add that I found the session to be excellent as usual, but also found some of the material sad and depressing: It looked like we had a lot of wasted years involved in negative thinking, and that we were now struggling to get out of or rid of. At the moment I couldn’t decide if everyone had such hassles in life, or if Jane and I had managed to create sets of beliefs that were indeed “beauts” and quite unusual. I was afraid our beliefs ruled our lives so completely, were so pervasive, that we’d never get out of their mazes. As I asked Paul O’Neill last month: “How do you be objective about something when you’re inside of it?”)